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The Social Origins of Islam



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Mohammed A. Bamyeh

The Social Origins of Islamm i n d , e c o n o m y, d i s c o u r s e

University of Minnesota Press — Minneapolis – London



Copyright 1999 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a re-

trieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the

publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290

Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520

http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bamyeh, Mohammed A.

The social origins of Islam : mind, economy, discourse / Mohammed A.

Bamyeh.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8166-3263-4 (hc. : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-8166-3264-2 (pbk. : alk.

paper)

1. Islam—Origin. 2. Arabian Peninsula—Social conditions. 3. Arabian

Peninsula—Civilization. I. Title.

BP55.B36 1999

297—dc21 98-42289

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1



Introduction vii

Part I: The Ground

one. The Ideology of the Horizons 3

Horizon, Vision, Settlement—Halting and Discourse—The Camel,

the Path, and the Marketplace two. Socioeconomy and the Horizon of Thought 17

Sedentarization—Money, Trade, and Abstract Thought—Mecca—

The Nomadic Flux—Kinda

three. Social Time, Death, and the Ideal 53

Rendering the Experience—Idealization and the Past—Mortality and the

Future—Waiting

four. Pre-Islamic Ontotheology and the Method of Knowledge 79

Paganism and the Idea of the Ritual—Reformers, Hanifism, PaganMonotheism—Examples and Commentary

five. The Discourse and the Path 115

Forms, Codes, Words—Nature, Text, Ruins—The Wandering Logic—

Sources of Structural Stability

Part II: The Faith

six. Prophetic Constitution 143

The Land Dreams of a Prophet—Constitution of Sagehood: Knowledge,

Foreknowledge—The Tear of the Poet and the Fear of the Prophet: Failures

of Belonging

Contents



seven. The House of the Umma and the Spider Web of the Tribe 179

The Tribe—The Ruins of the Tribe— Fitnah, Hijra, War—The Satanic

Verses and Their Background—The Boundaries of the Umma—

Hudaybiyyah and the Paradigms of the Umma

eight. Austerity, Power, and Worldly Exchange 231

Death, Subjectivity, and Identity—Austerity, Justice, Perishing: Moses and

‘Ubayd—God’s Contracts—War and the Code of Justice—Fate and the

Legitimacy of Acquisition

nine. In Lieu of a Conclusion: The Origins, the System, and the

Accident 257

Notes 271

Bibliography 299Index 305



The story examined in this work has thus far been largely confined to an

area of specialized scholarship that, as Edward Said has effectively demon-

strated, consciously resists theoretical accounts. “Regional Studies,” as

they are often called, are regularly restrained to “factual” narrative.1 This

work attempts, at least in part, to proceed against such a restriction. It em-

ploys interdisciplinary approaches from cultural anthropology, historical

sociology, Qur’anic exegesis, literary analysis, and economic history.

These approaches are employed to suggest some connective dynamicsoperating between grand spheres of social life. For example, what is par-

ticularly important here are such issues as the connections between the

emergence of certain economic practices (such as trade and money-based

exchange), cultural thought patterns (as observed in pre-Islamic poetry

and ontotheology), and the reconfiguration of transtribal patterns of soli-

darity. The central role of such links is indicated in the trilateral subtitle,

which suggests that the story of the origin of the set of doctrines that

came to be known as Islam is interwoven, in a complicated process, in thesociopolitical, social organizational, and cultural employment of a system

of faith. This process is embedded in conditions of material life, charted

vii

Introduction



amid a maze of existent ideational contours, and elaborated against the

backdrop of available modalities of expression.

In this sense, this is primarily a book in the social theory of ideological

transformation. It is an attempt to understand grand cultural shifts that

give rise to new systems of faith, conducted in the context of a momen-

tous, richly informative story. It is not a book of history, in the sense that it

does not claim to discover any new facts or to render a more “truthful”

causal sequence of events than hitherto attempted. Neither is it a total

thesis on what Islam is or was, in the sense that it refrains from any claim

regarding an essential meaning, an invariable ideological position, or a

uniform social role of the faith. In this work, my interest is extrinsic rather

than intrinsic, in the sense that I want to see what the story of Islam couldtell us about ideological formations in general, rather than strictly to tell a

specific historical tale. In this spirit, I emphasize a theoretically informed

perspective and generally refrain from pure philological digressions cus-

tomary in traditional orientalist scholarship.

Thus, this work employs a different approach to the question of histori-

cal factuality than do, for instance, the recent revisionist histories of

Patricia Crone and Sulayman Bashir. In the revisionist school, discoveries

are not made by marshaling in new “facts” about the origins of Islam but

by recombining and contrasting a variety of tales pervading well-known

classical sources.2 But according to what logic and what order of selection

are such recombinations and contrasts conducted? What validity do their

criteria possess? Take, for instance, Crone’s three criteria for dismantling

the reliability of the classical sources: contradictions, storytelling mode,

and later perfection.3 Why did such facts of discourse pose apparently

little problem for the ancient audience? In my view, studying an ancientworldview requires a readjustment of the listening faculties, an attention

to configurations of the world that an ancient audience could have digest-

ed with a yet-to-be appreciated contentment, and an ability to see what it

could have been possible to see in the past rather than to single-mindedly

insist on “facts” as if they possess the same value and appearance across

the distance of centuries.4 With some effort at listening to the interplay of

ideational and discursive configurations reverberating through the clas-

sical story of Islam, almost all “contradictions” uncovered by revisionisthistorians can be shown to be contradictions solely in a modern logic and

modality of reading.5

viii • Introduction



It is possible to argue that history itself does not exist as such without

an implicit or explicit theoretical perspective that allows it to be discerned

as being instructive. In this sense, if one drops preexisting lenses of per-

spective by which historical tales are organized, history begins to appear

untidy, unbalanced, vacuous, or at best irrelevant and nonindicative.With

no solid paradigmatic support, categories employed would be shifting

and confused, concepts and definitions unrefined and porous. With no

causal chain outlined in terms of acceptable rational precepts, the re-

ceived chronology would appear as one sediment loaded freely upon an-

other. With no value-oriented delimitation of the scope of the examina-

tion, visibility would be unwieldy and the focus migratory, as though one

were pursuing a nomadic journey through the pages.Thus, apart from an interminable submergence into the rich basin of

the philosophy of history, what order of coherence and relevance can one

propose for the story about to be told in the many pages to follow? One

of the distinctions between history and fiction is not simply that one is

reality and the other is not; nor is it that one is believable and the other

is not; nor is it that one is subject to scientific and methodical validation

from which the other is exempt. In modern times, the distinction is pre-

cisely that history is understood to contain moments along a trajectory

whose temporal links are causally rather than morally connected —even

though the cause can be shown to have a moral basis as well. History may

mean a variably articulated claim to structured connections between mo-

ments, up to and including the present.

Various hermeneutic traditions address the question of the status of

the present as a vantage point determining the kinds of questions history

will be asked to answer. For Hans-Georg Gadamer, the present and thepast could function as partners in a process of negotiation leading to some

sort of relocation of both from the paradigmatic confinements of their

moments. On the other hand, for a philosopher like Martin Heidegger,

the present itself can be of interest only insofar as one can use it as a tool

to measure the distance that has been crossed away from the past. In this

sense, the interest in history would be premised upon a profound es-

trangement from the spirit of modernity and would thus be moved by a

drive to settle contemporary accounts rather than a fixation on an essen-tial truth lurking in the depths of time. For Georg Lukàcs, historical inter-

est evidences a crisis-ridden consciousness, a consciousness to which the

Introduction • ix



world has ceased to appear in the form of a meaningful and self-evident

totality. Thus, the mind becomes confronted with a distinction between

the phenomenon in itself and the method for its comprehension. And it is

this distinction, for instance, that manifests itself between history on the

one hand and the philosophy of history—whether explicit in terms of

method or implicit in the choice of prisms and issues—on the other.6

History thus becomes a battleground of contemporary ideas, whereby its

raw materials are regrouped and reorganized, so that an original story

may be recast, reaffirmed, downplayed, or negated.

This volume seeks to navigate somewhat different waters from those

mapped out or suggested by the figures mentioned above. It revisits the

ancient story from two angles: One aims at discerning the peculiarity of aworldview and its metamorphoses in light of material conditions and his-

torical accidents and another aims at capturing atemporal logics of con-

nection between mind, economy, and discourse. A historical sociology of

consciousness, as one may provisionally call this method, entails noting

links not simply between “facts” and “ideas” but, more precisely, between

records of causally linked facts and appearances of logically connected

ideas. Since the historical sociology of consciousness is not “history” in

the narrow sense of the word,“facts”are not interesting for their own sake

but for the phenomenological imprints that they leave on the records

speaking of them. Such an orientation does not strive to understand what

the “idea” of Islam was, for instance, but how such an idea became think-

able at a particular point in time. For the historical sociology of con-

sciousness, the point concerns the conditions of life that could give rise to

the forms of thinking that become hospitable to such an idea as well as

to others.I confine the analysis of the “how” to a general level, such as in tracing

the growth of abstract thinking to sedentarization and the development

of a money economy. This link, as I attempt to show in that discussion,

does not spell out deterministic “causality,” for it is not as though one

came before the other, one was uniquely dependent on the other, or a re-

versal of the suggested sequence of the link was not possible. The connec-

tions suggested between abstract thought, money, and sedentarization are

neither strictly sequential nor necessarily exclusive in nature; a money economy requires the ability to abstract the world, and the ability to ab-

stract could grow as well out of a noticed possibility of enlarged social

x • Introduction



boundaries of exchange. But neither money nor abstract thinking is re-

stricted in terms of its significance to the possibility of the other. Nor is it

a question of money as such or abstract thinking as such; rather, the issue

is the larger styles of apprehending the world that the two engender when

they appear on the historical scene together.

Another set of concerns that the orientation toward a historical sociol-

ogy of consciousness raises is that of intentionality. When the mind finds

it necessary to communicate an idea, as in preaching, one expects to be

able to discern an intention. The question here concerns whether the

records allow us to decipher intentionality in this fashion. Is there an in-

tention or a plurality of intentions? And if there is a plurality of inten-

tions, according to what logic could they be brought into an appearanceof complementarity and homogeneity rather than incidental juxtaposi-

tion? Who was responsible for the intention? Who did the intending and

who received it? How was the intention (mis)understood? The “persistent

major themes,” which may suggest the diachronic consistency of some in-

tentions, themselves emerge out of a complicated process of revelation, re-

ception, social conflict, and accommodation. They cannot be presumed to

exist in an unsullied fashion at the level of the unanchored, transhistorical

text alone. How were they reconstituted through variations, consolida-

tions, or mutations driven by unsuspected encounters and logics? Were

they thought of as being “major” and uncompromisable by those articu-

lating them in the first place? Were they introduced for the sake of inten-

tions other than their face value, for example, as but one way of experi-

menting with many forms of expression striving to accomplish the same

objective, and did they survive as “persistent major themes” only after

they proved in practice to be the ones most suitable for arriving at whatwas intended?

And what was intended? Did the message not lose any trace of its origi-

nal intentions? Did it mean, from its first day, to develop into the forms

and meanings through which it found itself to be functioning at the later

stages of its journey? And who took up that journey? A homogeneous

group that could be described in totalizing terms such as “class,” “sect,”

“ideologues,” “reformers,” “rich,” “poor,” “merchants,” or did the riders

often change seats, composition, guides, and subsequently direction? Andif so, how could the “persistent major themes” be accounted for? What is

one to make of all those divergent, even antagonistic lives that have been

Introduction • xi



consumed along the road? How many classes, sects, rulers, ruled, ontolo-

gies, ideologies, and systems of reference claimed the same caravan? This

book seeks to outline some of the ideational foundations, socioeconomic

grounds, and discursive experiments through which the procession coa-

lesced as a text, appearing on the scene in a piecemeal fashion before

eventually closing the cover and thereby pronouncing the conclusion of

the journey. What is significant is not what seems to be a method of tex-

tual and ideational crystallization consisting of a sequence of accidents

but the various methods of signifying, articulating, and apprehending

such accidents and of eventually integrating them into larger systems of

interrelated beliefs by those living through them.

As the compendium of these methods, the Qur’an figures large in thisbook, especially in the later chapters. I consider it to be the most authentic

embodiment of the metamorphosing spirit of the age, not only because

of its exceptional temporal proximity to the events under investigation

but also because of the unique mixture of its own moods, fruitfully com-

parable to pre-Islamic patterns of poetry: linguistic textures, poetics, rep-

resentations, legalisms, metaphors, pedagogy, ontological foci, and the

historical marks and references upon which it justifies, locates, and inter-

prets itself. The relevance of such a text to the spirit of the age must not be

merely judged by what it says, whether explicitly or through contempora-

neous interpretations, but also by how it says it: the form and structure of

the argument, the method of reasoning, the logical chain, the immersion

of logic into aesthetics, the literary coating of all forms of resolution,

statements of fact, promises, and threats. The point is that effective ideo-

logical pedagogy consists not merely of statements of desirable content

but also of discursive reformulation, restructuring, repackaging, and re-insertion under different headings.

This orientation led me to rely on pre-Islamic poetry as a second major

point of analysis. The problem with studying that more-ancient record is

not only that fewer primary sources are available but also, and perhaps

more important, that we have no evidence indicating that any other form

of primary sources (apart from archaeology) could have ever existed at

all. The only form of communication worthy of immortalizing, the only

records worthy of any effort at preservation were seen by contemporariesthemselves to consist of nothing other than poetry. Poetry, at that finest

moment of its history, was the ultimate sociophilosophical treatise: It

xii • Introduction



expressed and contained the spirit of the times not only because of the

“heterogeneity” of topics it had reassembled and reorganized in peculiar

ways but also because of its wide celebration. As an oral medium, it could

not have been saved if it were not ubiquitous in the land or deemed to be

of special standing. It became, therefore, a witness to an altogether lost

life, with its values, priorities, logics, and idealizations.

Finally, a note on the sources. Wherever they appear, the Qur’anic cita-

tions are taken from N. J. Dawood’s excellent translation, occasionally

altered where noted. The classical histories (al-Tabari, Ibn Hisham, Ibn

Sa‘d, al-Waqidi, and others) have been duly consulted, together with con-

temporary scholarship. As for pre-Islamic poetry, I have consulted the

extant compilations, which include those of Ibn Kaisan (d. 932), Ibnal-Anbari (d. 939), al-Zauzani (d. 1093), and at-Tibrizi (d. 1109), as well

as the version available in al-Qurashi’s (d. 878) Jamharat Ash‘ar al-‘Arab.

Also of some use was the larger body of poetry extant from that pe-

riod, scattered in several ancient encyclopedic compilations, such as Ibn

Qutaybah’s (d. 889) Al-Shi‘r wal Shu‘ara’, al-Mufaddal al-Dabbi’s (d. 786)

Mufaddaliyyat, and the infinitely resourceful Kitab al-Aghani of Abi al-

Faraj al-Isbahani (d. 967). The emphasis here, however, is on the long

odes. For that purpose, I followed the rendition offered in the compilation

generally considered to be the most reliable, namely that of at-Tibrizi, al-

though neither blindly nor to the extent that concerns of transcription,

order, or matters of otherwise pure historicist detail could derail the re-

flective nature of the commentary. All couplet numbers refer therefore to

C. J. Lyall’s edition of that compilation. Quotations from that compilation

are taken from the A. J. Arberry translation, sparingly modified where

noted. Any translations, as well as accompanying damage, of the three lesscanonical odes (those of an-Nabigha, al-A‘sha, and ‘Ubayd) are mine.

Unless otherwise noted, all dates are a.d. Finally, since I envisioned the

broader affinity of this study to belong to social theory rather than strictly

to the copious tradition of orientalist scholarship, I have greatly simpli-

fied Arabic transliteration, confining diacritical remarks to the ‘ayn and

the hamza.

Introduction • xiii



Part I: The Ground



horizon, vision, settlement

We are speaking of a terrain in which life repeats itself both endlessly and

precariously. Here, the eyes of the inhabitant open daily to a topography

of solemn solitude, far more imposing to the soul than the minuscule

islets of social life encountered thereupon. The desert is a sphere of ab-

solute speechlessness. What is strange in the desert is speaking, thinking

in words, dialogizing, communicating. In this vast expanse, ridiculing all

notions of paramount subjectivity, profuse wilderness covers all visible

destinations between the here and all horizons; the human actor is but an

insignificant footnote to the space; to think of presence in dogmatic terms

of space—where space as a habitat is at best a seasonal interruption—is to

practically annul oneself. Only a perennially visible enigma, the horizon,

sets the boundaries of knowable nature. Like the sea, the horizon of the

desert stands out in contrast to the landscape as the unreachable terminus

of nature, its inconclusive conclusion.

The Arabian Peninsula—the cradle of Islam—is dominated by the twovast deserts that occupy the bulk of the land. The great Nufud wilderness

claims much of the north, while the Empty Quarter, one of the most arid

3

one

The Ideology of the Horizons



and impassable deserts on earth, stretches over half a million square kilo-

meters in the south. Such immense horizons confound the ideas of begin-

ning and end, depositing the concept of eternity in the heart of the con-

crete present. This ideology of the horizons, as will become apparent in

subsequent chapters, is oblivious to human structures of presence as a

purposeful progression of moments where one constructs for oneself a

path in time, periodizes existence, valorizes destination. In other words,

such an ideology sees in the spectacle of the horizon not so much an invit-

ing mirage as the most fundamental picture of the emptiness of grandiose

human quests.

There are notable exceptions, of course, to this story. The recurrent

Semitic migrations outside of the peninsula during the four millenniapreceding Islam were clearly intended to free population groups from

such a magnitude of resourcelessness. But in this volume we are con-

cerned with those who stayed and developed sedentary societies and

sedentary ways of looking that challenged the desert’s inhospitability

to any other life than one of permanent wandering. The story of Islam,

along with many contemporaneous theological and cosmological experi-

ments, rotates around such tensions in the ways of seeing and assessing

the outside—and by extension the inside—of human society.

But before such a permanent encampment, the concreteness of exis-

tential emptiness could be derived purely by looking. No exceptional abil-

ity to see into the nature of things was required. The eternity of the same

readily revealed itself to all those who had the patience to pause long

enough to appreciate the horizons, the boundaries of the magnificent

desert, and long enough to allow the horizon to fully transform itself into

an idea, to become a part of seeing in the most fundamental way, in otherwords, to become an “ideology.” The ideology of horizons is a peculiar

production of this form of wilderness. And it is an ideology that sustains

wandering. Here, the horizon, consisting of visible sameness, visible

emptiness, visible lack of any promise whatever, nullifies the quest after

it. But on the other hand, such a horizon speaks of the conclusion of

the desert and promises an unknown beyond, a different nature that can-

not be seen without wandering toward the horizon. And in this other ca-

pacity, the horizon instigates the quest for that beyond.This perplexing appeal of the horizon situates it exactly at the borderline

between two modes of wandering. One mode is to wander as a natural

4 • Ideology of the Horizons



fate, preordained by the indifference of the desolate landscape to ordinary

human needs. The other mode is to invest in the wandering a teleological

scheme of crossing over into a land of lush riverbanks, where the horizon

would gradually disappear as an invitation, goal, or boundary of perma-

nent wandering. In both cases, the desert itself only promises traces,

ruins, and betrayals of past loves and lives; nothing more. One wanders,

and one forgets through wandering—in effect eliminating from view—

the desert’s failure to sustain other than its own overpowering expanse,

eternal and normative as it seems. Here, if there is a destination, one

reaches it by simply moving. No elaborate schemes are required. No

scheming subject is required. In fact, no subject at all is required. Until

poetic, cosmological, and thematic discourses about that nature began tobe produced, valued, and preserved, there were no forms imposed on it.

For the wanderer, the desert formed itself and dissipated along the way,

with no everlasting images. Such a nature formed itself in the mode of

interruptions, as though to encourage existence a little longer, precisely

when the wanderer was about to perish. This is how the nomadic ode

itself proceeded until exhaustion (and not conclusion) consumed its en-

ergy. But until the regular production and preservation of discourse and

sedentarism, such interruptions were no more than erasable bursts of life.

There was wandering, but there were no roads, no pathways, no passages

into an alternative ideology or life, no meaning for time or direction.

Unless one ceased to be a nomad, nothing altered that eternal presence.

Throughout the peninsula, movement was the norm and halting the

exception. Agriculture, the primary precondition for settlement, was pos-

sible as a large-scale activity only in Yemen and the Green Mountain in

‘Uman.1

Some isolated agricultural colonies also developed in some ele-vated regions of Hijaz and Najd, the most important of which was in and

around Ta’if, which supplied Mecca with much of its food.2 Mecca itself,

the birthplace of Islam, was far from being an agricultural community. In

fact, it grew like a wild thorn amid an arid environment of solid rock. It

survived only because of the growing world trade that passed through

it (which will be explored in more detail in Chapter 2). But in spite of

its world connection, Mecca, as a particular form of settlement, was left

to determine its own ideology with reference to its own preconditionsand surroundings, where nomadism and wandering predominated for

enormous distances in all directions. With the exception of Yemen, the

Ideology of the Horizons • 5



great powers of the time—the Romans, the Sassanids, the Abyssinians—

displayed little interest in any part of the Arabian Peninsula.

Thus, the particular story of permanent halting in Mecca contains si-

multaneous elements of knowledge of and independence from all the

great powers of the epoch (including peninsular powers such as Yemen).

Mecca’s location deep in the desert insulated the city from the fate of the

other nascent trading centers that were annexed to such powers. Palmyra

and Petra were annexed by Rome, ‘Aden was dominated by the Abyssini-

ans and Sassanids. But it was also the relations with such powers that sta-

bilized a form of halting, which would otherwise have been devoured by

a nature that does not usually allow it. The Qur’an itself registers a pro-

found awareness of Mecca’s precarious exceptionalism, nestled as it is in aresourceless terrain that under normal circumstances would not have al-

lowed it to survive beyond a season or two. Such an exception, in turn,

could be available only to foundational projects associated with prophetic

effort—Abraham’s in this case: “Abraham said: ‘Lord, I have settled some

of my offspring in a barren valley near Your Sacred House. . . . Put in the

hearts of men kindness towards them, and provide them with the earth’s

fruits, so they may give thanks.’”3

In this case, an act of halting—indeed, an expression of an intention to

halt forever—was seen to depend on God’s leave and bounty. This is not

to say, however, that a wandering nomad had no need for deities or that

the sedentary God’s credentials consisted in his assistance in a mere earth-

ly and immediate task. The story is far more complex than that. As will

become apparent in subsequent chapters, the decision and capacity to

halt involve major metaphysical reorientations. Much of the dilemmas of

Abraham’s descendants, indeed, consisted of the question of how to over-come the ideology of the horizons, with all of its underpinnings. Such un-

derpinnings had involved an attenuation of the idea of displacement, a

cyclical vision of nature, a materialist rather than spiritualist contextuali-

zation of the idea of fate, an understanding of human and logical finitude

in terms of processional exhaustion rather than of summary verdict or

unifying conclusion, a suspicion of subjective construction and planning,

a tendency to mock abstract authority, and an almost reflexive antipathy

to grand political schemes in general. In an important sense, the idea of amonotheistic God exemplified a sustained attack on the ideology of the

horizons and an effort to place the experiences of halting and wandering




under a different order of regulation than those the nomad was willing to

tolerate. This book will examine the rich dialectic interaction between that

ideology of the horizons and the emergent faith and the resulting meta-

morphoses in all social and discursive spheres affected by both. But first,

where does the story begin? If halting had accentuated for Abraham the

necessity of God, what did that same halting signify for a more resilient

nomad?

halting and discourse

“Halt, friends both! Let us weep, recalling a love[r] and a lodging.” So be-

gins the great ode of Imru’ l-Qays.4

In the Bedouin conditions of life, theact of halting is conspicuous. There are no permanent lodgings, merely

temporary territorial claims; sometimes these claims are cyclical or sea-

sonal; other times a place is inhabited for the duration allowed by nature

and then left for good. Home, to the extent that the term refers to a physi-

cal certitude, is located more frequently, as we shall see, on the back of a

wandering camel than in any clearly demarcated geography. Residence is

not a first principle toward which life is projected or oriented or struc-

tured: Residence is merely a state of transition between movements. It is

significant, therefore, that this ode, as well as all other great pre-Islamic

odes, begins with an act of halting. The poetic speech—as opposed to all

other nonpreservable discourses—begins (and is perhaps motivated) when

an interruption of a natural flow of movement is in order.

Thus, we have a poeticized interruption. That an oral tradition came to

life, gathered the poem, and kept it from diffusing back into the mortal

sphere of everyday language was perhaps a by-product of the invention of poetry itself. Such a view assumes that the poetic rendition of the act of

halting was communicating with an already existent order of values, an

order that was predestined to preserve for posterity the irruption of such

discourse. The fact that halting is so paramountly displayed in such odes

reflects that order, since halting here interrupts the normative conduct of

life’s course. In this, as well as in the other pre-Islamic odes, the act of halt-

ing is conducted before a ruined site of past encampment, love, memory,

adventure, longing. This interruption of movement thus can only usher inthe realization that life lacks a meaningful totality, that it consists of a se-

ries of irreplaceable losses as it proceeds through time. This recognition




instigates a particular form of remembrance: Time is experienced not as

an unfolding of potentialities but as a closing off of tangibilities. The salute

is decidedly toward the past.

The ten legendary pre-Islamic odes are remarkably consistent on this

score. In this ode as well as in all the others, the moment of halting is sig-

nificant even if, or perhaps because, it is abrogated shortly thereafter.

From this, various discussions ensue, presenting a modern reader with a

scene of monumental, or rather encyclopedic, chaos. The beginning, how-

ever, is unwavering: All odes begin with halting. That is the most obvious

formal unity in the tradition. That was, to be sure, how a “tradition” was

recognized in the first place: A recognizable form was invoked, a form that

provided the basis for the poem’s belonging among poetry. Thus, haltingis a formula by which discourses and meditations other than halting are

introduced.

The elaborations that follow halting are part and parcel of the mor-

phology of the act, especially with respect to the imposing landscape’s re-

lation to human life. Halting is obviously a spatially biased act that in some

way anticipates such specifications. But this is what the ode (mu‘allaqa,

pl.: mu‘allaqat ) itself seems to be in a hurry to provide in no ambiguous

fashion:

Halt . . .

by the rim of the twisted sands between Ed-Dakhool and Haumal,

[then] Toodih and El-Mikrat, whose trace is not yet effaced

for all the spinning of the south winds and northern blasts.

These are names of localities, the dwelling places of lovers from times

past. The locations could indicate either spatiality or temporality, that is,they could either indicate the exact geographic point where the halting

is taking place, or they could, equally probably, refer to a succession of

dwellings where the lovers had once lived. The fact that the clarification is

unimportant to a poet is important in itself. For the ambiguity could

indeed indicate that the primordial audience knew of only one possible

relationship between such locations, thus obviating the need for further

deliberations. It could also be part of an economy of speech characteristic

of self-dialogues in the desert. And it could as well refer to an altogetherdifferent arrangement of the world, in which confounding temporal and

spatial elements posed little problem. And there is also the possibility that




such conflations flowed naturally from the logic of poetry itself, that is,

poetry as that preserve that discourse sets aside to all nonnormative, non-

instrumental, noncommunicable experiments entrusted with the task of

bringing additional conditions of being into language. There are other

interpretive possibilities as well. What is more interesting about the ques-

tion of the whereabouts is that names of locations always appear when-

ever an invocation to halting is in order. The act of halting is always an-

chored upon some specifiable geography. There seemed to be a need to

firmly ground the halting act, so as to reproduce in it, as it were, the pri-

mal certitude of movement. One halts and ascertains the reality of such a

moment in time by profuse naming.

The splash of names populating the moment at which halting is in-voked accords spaciality a high order of recognition. Here, a name carves

out of the infinite expanse of nature a finite space, which as it coalesces

makes geographic knowledge possible and recurrent. In the descriptions

of ancient Arab geographers, who wrote after the coming of Islam, one

can still discern the lack of consolidation of names of places and territo-

ries. The notion of “borders” in the peninsula, for instance, often referred

only to the continually shifting territories of wandering tribes rather than

to stable geographic contours. Territorial designations were subsumed

within an immense but monolithic topography, with enormous distances

separating the habitable quarters. The five major regions of the peninsula

recognized by geographers (Najd, Hijaz, Tuhama, Yemen, and ‘Urud) re-

ferred to fluid and coextensive spatial generalities. Al-Alusi, for instance,

supports the claim that Mecca lay in Tuhama and not in Hijaz, contrary to

popular belief, and that Hijaz contained no cities other than Yathrib.5 On

the other hand, the authoritative geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi assertsthat both Yathrib and Ta’if lie within Hijaz, and reports with no comment

the claim by others that Yathrib could be in either Hijaz or Tuhama.6

Apart from ‘Urud (or Yamama), Bahrain is sometimes added as a sixth re-

gion.7 Others considered Bahrain to be part of ‘Iraq. Yaqut, however, con-

siders Yamama to be part of Najd, being completely distinct from ‘Urud,

its supposed geographical domain.8 Moving south toward Yemen, we en-

counter the same problem of determining approximate boundaries in the

ancient world; thus, al-Istakhri, one of the most precise of the ancientArab geographers, extends Yemen nearly to Mecca, so that Tuhama be-

comes a mere subregion of Yemen.9 A similar hint at the extension of




Yemen is encountered in al-Mas‘udi’s descriptions.10 Others distinguish

Yemen from its southern expanse of Hadramaut, which had enjoyed cer-

tain periods of semi-independent social, political, and economic evolu-

tion from the rest of the Arabian Peninsula.

Such uncertain, fluid spaces are a fundamental part of the story. The

different claims regarding their scope, extension, tribes, and pathways in-

dicate an ongoing effort to clarify their relationship to each other. Like the

more precise locales in the pre-Islamic mu‘allaqat, such spaces are no

longer extensions of an anonymous, vast desert extending forever be-

tween the horizons. Unlike the geographer’s space, the space in the no-

madic ode is more certain, fully referenced, bounded. There is, in the first

instance, a wanderer who comes back, cyclically or by random chance, toa space containing a precious memory. From the vantage point of the

returning wanderer, the perishability of all things except the place itself

is confirmed by the singular persistence of its traces in the face of time,

a persistence outlasting the love affair that had originally defined it.

Realizing the stubborn resilience of the space, its power over all other na-

tures, its resistance to disappearance, its indifference to time, in short, its

negational definition of the unsettled nature of nomadic society itself, the

name of the space assumes a power of its own, and therefrom is born its

entitlement to a more accurate description. The space, then, is not a mere

location but an essential experience by which the lover is defined: The

poem thus begins here, and not with the unanchored self. The space

works out its magic, therefore, by reminding the wanderer that he himself

had lived, lost, or metamorphosed, leaving him thereafter with ponderous

memory. The memory takes over and begins compiling a record of values

and events that are then deposited in a distinct form of discourse.Thus, it is not halting per se or even the naming and specifying of spa-

ciality but, rather, the deposition of memory into discourse that allows an

audible speaking subject to crystallize. The poet maneuvers from the

place into himself. The place functions in the poem as it does in nomadic

life itself: as a point of transition, where discourse lingers only until mem-

ory completes its search about the past amid the traces. Thereafter, the

place is unceremoniously abandoned. The memory, after all, is reserved

neither for the intrinsic value of the place nor for the place’s empiricalcohesion, exclusiveness, or natural distinction but, rather, for the actions

that had constituted the place.




Life in the amorphous expanse of the desert does not guarantee a place

any suprahuman self-evidence. Life, to be sure, endures in spite of the in-

hospitable sameness of the desert. And it is from this resistance to nature

that a place takes its meaning. Life continues on the basis of a hope, which

is continually frustrated but without which no place could ever promise

the potentiality of becoming a home. The possibility of a social home, of a

human togetherness persisting in the face of nature, not only stabilizes

the idea of a “place”but sets the task of finding an empirical proof of such

a possibility. Once found, the place is claimed with the meticulous divi-

sion of labor that is seen to be incumbent upon residence and a require-

ment for its continuation. Such a relationship to a place allows competing

discourses over land, nature, and their values to flourish, which is how aplace is given a name and which is, ultimately, how the idea of place is

completed with an accompanying history. Such a place, then, forms to

house and collect the scattered passions of the wanderer. The pre-Qur’anic

poetry here invests itself not in nature as such but in namable nature.

the camel, the path, and th e marketplace

The emergence of sedentary societies did not necessarily entail the oblivion

of the horizons of wandering. This was especially true in nonagricultural

communities, most notably Mecca. Having originally emerged as a cara-

van station within world-scale commerce, the city’s subsequent livelihood

depended on its active promotion of and participation in an annual cycle

of marketplaces (suqs ). Here, the city with the barren surroundings func-

tioned as a locus of migratory trade that completed its cycle in it. Such

moving seasonal suqs, in turn, functioned as a framework for commercial,cultural, and political intercommunication between the various regions.

The picture that can be gleaned from various authorities provides for an

annual cycle consisting of about fifteen seasonal suqs, which rotated clock-

wise around the peninsula throughout the months of the year, commenc-

ing with the suqs of Bahrain11 and ‘Uman, moving then southwest to the

region of Hadramaut, then northward to Yemen, ending with five succes-

sive suqs in and around Mecca. The cycle culminated in the festive suq of

‘Ukaz, which was held immediately before the pre-Islamic pagan pilgrim-age to Mecca’s sanctuary, the haram.12

To fully appreciate the nature and organizational imperatives of such




an economic cycle, one must bear in mind the great distances involved,

distances magnified by the dearth of settlements along the way. Historical

travelers report that a caravan circling the peninsula could complete the

journey in about seven months, with an average travel time of about a

month between each of the major inhabited regions. By contrast, once the

caravans began to venture northward into the Syrian frontiers, the dis-

tances between inhabited communities became markedly shorter.13 Thus,

although urban and agricultural sanctuaries were independent enclaves

separated from each other by vast seas of sand and nomadism—especially

in the central and western regions—regular communication links did

form between such sedentaries. Politically and spiritually, however, such

regions remained distinct from each other. Other than the marketplaceroutes, the masalik (pathways) linking them were limited in number and

reach.

All these defining macrophenomena—communicative links, trade-

based sedentarism, even nomadism itself—were scarcely possible in such

a landscape without the camel. Some commentators argue that Bedouin

lifestyle itself was a later development, since it was impossible before the

domestication of the camel toward the middle of the second millennium

b.c.14 However, it was not only nomadism but commerce itself that was

impossible without the camel.15 This extraordinary animal is uniquely

adapted to the harshness of the desert, with the capacity to forego water

for up to five days in the summer and twenty-five days in the winter and

to reuse food stored in its stomach, and its milk was an important source

of nutrition. Furthermore, not only was it the only means of transporta-

tion in the desert, but it also required little upkeep. Thus, it became—as

will be detailed in Chapter 2—a standard of value, with many calculationssuch as dowry, wealth, blood money (diyyah), and gambling debts being

made in terms of number of camels. Nothing explains the value of the

camel in such a landscape more than the number of its names in ancient

Arabic; there are said to be a thousand.

For our purposes here, the significance of the camel emanates from its

grand ideational status not simply as an enabler of a certain style of life

but as the enabler of a certain attitude toward the world, an attitude con-

ditioned by migration and movement. In the odes, the animal’s extendedattributes combine movement, escape, decrepitude, and triumph, for

which the camel alone stands as the metaphor. Thus, whereas the mo-




ment of halting could only bring about the realization of time and loss,

movement—as clearly symbolized in the nomadic odes by the camel—

occupies multiple significations and outlines metamorphoses. The camel

is no longer simply a beast of burden; rather, it is a prime signifier of the

complexity of life and its events. For instance, the ostracized poet Tarafa

Ibn l-‘Abd, who expresses no more than a short and obligatory infatua-

tion with the ruins before which his ode opens, wanders away from the

eyesore on the back of his camel as early as the third couplet. The naming

that follows is reserved to outlining the course of the journey (c. 3–4).

Naming here carves out not a stability but a path. The beauty of one love-

ly woman who leaves with her wandering people—a scene described until

the tenth couplet—is appreciated only from a distance. The poet hereloves only from afar, rarely halting to actually enjoy or experience any ap-

preciable sight. Yet when movement starts again in full (starting in c. 11),

passions fly out of control over nothing other than the animal that en-

ables movement. The unsurpassable fondness with which she is described

runs remarkably consistently for thirty uninterrupted couplets, and the

theme recurs frequently afterward. What is still more interesting in this

masterful sequence is the presence of a rare organizing formula for this

theme, with an “introductory” as well as a “concluding” couplet:

Ah, but when grief assails me, straightway I ride it off

mounted on my swift, lean-flanked camel, night and day racing. (c. 11)

Such is the beast I ride, when my companion cries

“Would I might ransom you, and be ransomed, from yonder waste!” (c. 39)

Such bounding of the discourse from both ends is a rare structure in the

pre-Islamic ode. In this case, the structure is clearly reserved to elements

of value, a value that is not subordinate to any other imagery. Such a the-

matic consistency is not restricted to the animal per se but applies more to

the act of continuous movement as the discourse is being produced: We

enter this discourse to find the poet riding, and we depart with him still

riding. The length of the speech had not altered the act of moving. For it

is in this continuity of movement that the poet finds his freedom from the

dangerous human vice of melancholy (hamm).A similar and somewhat more complicated structure is encountered

in the ode of Labid Ibn Rabi‘ah—to be discussed in more detail in a later




chapter. When Labid abandons the ruinous site, he needs to outline the

escape vehicle as well (c. 22). In the same mode, the more sedentary

an-Nabigha adh Dhubyani advises a retreat along with a specification of

its means: “So get away from this eyesore, there is no return for it / And

gather the rafters on [the back of] a stiff-boned mare” (c. 7). In all such

situations, the beast of burden, depleted by so much movement, comes

to carry the distressed character away, often to no particular destination

and often to a destination that only gradually reveals itself. In the mean-

time, the poetic discourse consumes itself with the love for the animal. It

is, after all, the vehicle that empowers the subject over that moment of

halting, which served only to confirm that it must not be repeated too

often.The journey away from the ruins does not consist, however, in the

complete abandonment of an experience of their essence. To the contrary,

the wanderer leaves the ruins on an equally ruined escape vehicle:“Break . . .

with a lean camel to ride on, that many journeyings / have fined to a bare

thinness of spine and shrunken hump” (Labid, c. 22). In other words, the

wanderer takes the ruins along, renaming them in the process as a “camel.”

The paramount image of dilapidation thus engulfs the spheres of both

movement and halting. But the interesting point is that such an admit-

tedly collapsing vehicle itself contains the possibility of joyful triumph

over desolate destiny:

Break . . . with a lean camel to ride on, that many journeyings

have fined to a bare thinness of spine and shrunken hump,

one that, when her flesh is fallen away and her strength is spent

and her ankle-thongs are worn to ribbons of long fatigue,

yet rejoices in her bridle, and runs still as if she were

a roseate cloud, rain-emptied, that flies with the south wind. (c. 22–24)

The joyous flight of this frail creature in the harsh desert is followed by

similar metaphors for survival of the destitute. A she-ass and her compan-

ion roam a tortuous, drought-stricken wilderness (c. 25–35), ultimately

reaching a lush oasis after an onerous journey. A wild cow searches, ago-

nizingly, for her devoured young and is devastated by losses, but she is ul-

timately triumphant (c. 36–52). At a moment of absolute hopelessness,she is detected by hunters. She defends herself heroically against the hunt-

ing hounds, and the episode terminates with a festive account of her sur-




vival. We know that both the asses and the wild cow are metaphors for the

she-camel because of this structure, which bounds the discourse about

them with an introduction and a conclusion, both of which explicitly cele-

brate the camel. Thus, in this, as well as in most other poetics of that antiq-

uity, the she-camel—the enabler of life and movement in the desert—is as

much at the center of the speech as is the speaking subject himself. In fact,

the camel seems to occur and recur with much more stability. The camel

is not just an animal or even a word but, rather, a code name for order and

reliability in nature. At the end of both metaphoric cycles, the camel sur-

faces again as the obvious conclusion from such experiences (“Upon such

a camel . . .”) (c. 53).

Thus, in the otherwise confident ode of the warrior ‘Antara, it is theshe-camel that reemerges at one point to rescue the poem from a se-

quence perilous because of its expressed uncertainty and directionless-

ness (c. 23–27). Without much of an introduction, the ode begins to de-

lineate a destination, giving way to this feeling that we are already in the

middle of a journey. It even seems that we have been moving all along: As

far as one can tell, the she-camel comes back with a little detail from a

journey already in progress (c. 28). Thus, here we have not so much an

animal as an organizing principle for both life and discourse. And we find

subsequent metaphors of order in general expressed with reference to the

animal. As such, the camel became one of the few objects of life that, once

introduced into a discourse, could not be dismissed without a ceremoni-

ous conclusion.

The beginning of the end of such an ideology is most evident in such

poetics as the ode of an-Nabigha, one of the least nomadic of the pre-

Islamic poets. In his ode, the camel’s adventures in the wilderness and itsobvious decrepitude are not metaphors for struggle, triumph, or norma-

tive or conclusive existence as much as they are a fountain of fears that

cannot be dispensed with in the way of a conclusion. In an-Nabigha’s ode,

little space is dedicated to describing the she-camel herself; instead, her

space is occupied by its metaphor, whose fate is uncertain (c. 10–19).16

The she-camel herself, the essence of all metaphors of wandering, dis-

appears into oblivion and never resurfaces again, save to announce a de-

sire to end the journey in couplet 20. At such a point in the history of thetradition, wandering is not so much a glorification of freedom as a threat

to existence itself; wandering is no longer normative, expected, periodic.




The wandering comes to a halt, the uncertainty of the path surrenders to

the regularity of the caravan, the norm of travel becomes the continual

outline of a destination. The sedentary path, conditioned as it is by a fear

of this norm of recurrent loss, aimlessness, and effacement of traces, be-

gins to lead to delineations beyond the realm of this dangerous world.




Nomadic (badawah) and sedentary (hadarah) lifestyles—along with some

important subdivisions—constituted the two recognizable forms of so-

cial organization before and after the coming of Islam. Ibn Khaldun situ-

ated the badawah lifestyle historically before the hadarah, arguing that the

formation of a sedentary society comes about only after an accumulation

of nomadic wealth motivates a settlement.1 Other historians, such as al-

Mas‘udi, also affirmed the chronological precedence of badawah.2 A more

dynamic picture, however, emerges when one examines geographic ency-

clopedias, such as Yaqut’s or al-Bekri’s, that outline the seasonal or tempo-ral nature of many localities associated with a sedentary lifestyle. There

are hints of an effort at sedentarization, an effort continuously frustrated

by the scarcity of water and fertile land and the frequency of droughts.

Under such circumstances, one can recognize an immutable society whose

austerity regularly reproduces life just as is, without accumulation.

In itself, the barren land of northern Arabia could sustain little more

than the lifestyle of the nomad, who was constantly wandering in search

of water and grazing land for cattle and who was regularly forced to re-sort to raiding and marauding. Together, pastoralism, plunder (ghazw ),

and to a limited extent hunting provided a closed world of nomadic

17

two

Socioeconomy and the Horizon of Thought



economy that could be broken out of only through participation in the

trade of the external world, and then only as an intermediary between

two or more rich civilizations, since northern Arabia had little of its own

to export. But even such an intermediary role could scarcely materialize

without at least one of two developments: (1) The volume of commerce

passing through the desert may grow rapidly. The participation of the

local population is enlisted by this enterprise in various capacities (as

providers of petty services, as guides, or as protectors and agents for the

caravans). Such activities may culminate in the investment of local capi-

tal in all facets of import and export activities. Or (2) the intermediary

role of other agents may collapse, as was the case during the two cen-

turies preceding Islam, with the decline of Yemen, on the one hand, andof the land route that had connected the warring Sassanid Empire and

Byzantium, on the other.

There is little else to account for the birth and survival of sedentary life

in Hijaz and the northern peninsula. A city like Mecca, for instance,

throve originally as little more than a station for the northbound caravans

originating from the port of ‘Aden and elsewhere in southern Arabia, which

ended their journey in such frontier markets as Petra, Bostra, Taima’, or

Daumat al-Jandal. Such caravans carried goods to meet Byzantium’s

needs. In the process, they created other markets, as will be outlined later.

As the quantity of trade grew and as the states and tribes that had initially

supported that trade declined in power, the inhabitants of such cities, es-

pecially Mecca, gradually abandoned their auxiliary role as dependents on

caravans initiated and led by exogenous forces and began to engage di-

rectly in long-distance commerce.3

sedentarization

Beyond the few fortified agricultural colonies, in such an inhospitable

landscape the dynamics of sedentarization centered around trade and its

infrastructure, such as caravan stations, and eventually provided territorial

bases for organizing, financing, and lending to facilitate trade expeditions.

Mecca offers the best illustration of such a transformation; it developed

from a simple caravan station with an uncertain future into a complexcenter of long-distance trade, while retaining its service function and de-

veloping it into more intricate and spiritual forms. These forms were, in

18 • Socioeconomy and the Horizon of Thought



turn, determined in part by the nature of the diverse communities, Arab

as well as non-Arab, with whom Mecca had to deal. The possibility of in-

tegrating most Bedouins into trade-based sedentarism was limited by a

number of factors: the volume of the trade, the ability of powerful seden-

tary tribes (in this case, the Quraysh) to retain a monopoly on trade, and

most nomads’ lack of the necessary surplus capital. The last point is of

crucial importance, particularly because the formation of the original

commercial capital in Mecca had already raised the minimum surplus

needed for participation in the caravans. This dynamic is alluded to in a

Qur’anic passage commenting on the exclusionary behavior of the traders

of Sheba, who are denounced for having asked God to make their caravan

rest stops farther apart, ostensibly in order to prevent those who couldnot carry enough sustenance from taking part.4

Such conditions, coupled with the fact that there is little evidence that

trade routes through western Arabia were stabilized before the sixth cen-

tury, indicate that sedentarization itself was a reversible experience. With-

out further developments, founding a permanent settlement does not

necessarily offer greater safety than nomadic existence proper. But it does

have some motivating factors:

1. As Ibn Khaldun observes, one route to sedentarization is established

with an increase in the wealth of the nomad. The idea of an “increase”

should perhaps refer more precisely, in this context, to consistent above-

subsistence-level acquisition, which could result from a prolonged period

of conditions favorable to pastoralism.Within the Bedouin socioeconomy,

such a surplus could neither be profitably invested nor adequately pro-

tected. Anatoli Khazanov notes that property differences among nomadsare often temporary and are limited not only by the ecology but also by

the “demands of cooperation and mutual aid.” Such property inequalities

are possible only when nomads become more strongly connected to

sedentary communities or when a nomadic state comes into existence.5 It

is worth noting that the latter dynamic can be clearly discerned here, in

the case of the tribes that were connected to the seminomadic dynasties

at the frontiers of northern Arabia (which collapsed, as will be discussed

later, shortly before the rise of Islam). Sedentarization here offered amethod for protecting such wealth from the uncertainties of the badawah

life, while it offered possible venues for its further accumulation.

Socioeconomy and the Horizon of Thought • 19



2. Prolonged below-subsistence-level acquisition could also motivate

sedentarization. A few years of misfortune in ghazw and unfavorable con-

ditions for pastoralism could lead either to the extinction of the nomadic

community or to its sedentarization in the meager hope of finding viable

alternative conditions for existence. This was also a dynamic operating in

the pre-Islamic epoch, when there was an increase in nomadic warfare, as

will be outlined later, coupled with a prolonged series of droughts.6 With

few possessions of their own, these sedentarized nomadic communities

were placed in the lowest socioeconomic echelons of the city society and

thus contributed to its emerging stratification. It is likely that in Mecca

communities such as al-Ahabish, al-Ahlaf, and to an extent the Zawaher

of Quraysh itself, along with other lower-caste communities, had suchorigins.

3. Large nomadic social units could opt for sedentarization instead of the

inevitable break up into smaller units that would occur if their badawah

life was to be continued. Naturally, the area chosen for such sedentariza-

tion had to be capable of providing the newcomers with conditions able

to sustain longtime residence. Yathrib is a case in point: From the very

beginning it offered a proximity to agricultural colonies and caravan sta-tions, thus allowing its inhabitants to practice both trade and agriculture.

In comparison, a city like Mecca was compelled because of the barren-

ness of its surroundings to engage in nothing but trade and services,

which furnished the ground for a complete ideological displacement of

the badawah world outlook by the time of Muhammad. In Yathrib, on the

other hand, the Aus and Khazraj newcomers joined the earlier Jewish in-

habitants without losing much of their Bedouin outlook, as the city pro-vided less of an incentive for them to concentrate all of their productive

and creative energies in a single-minded obsession with trade and its con-

comitant forms of rationality.7

money, trade, and abstract thought

In the particular case of trade-based sedentarization (and more specifically,

that concerned with long-distance, nonbarter forms of exchange), onecan detect a transition away from an antecedent order of value when the

sedentarizing nomads abandoned the use of direct assets—camels and




herds—as media of exchange, replacing them with Roman and Persian

coins so that more-complex transactions could take place. Before the in-

troduction of abstract money value, direct assets, made up solely of herds,

constituted the only meaningful acquisition for the Bedouin. Nomadic

subsistence economy proper knew no abstract medium of exchange such

as money. Nomadic exchange was based on consumable possessions and

therefore took the form of barter, with the camel, in whose terms the

significant transactions were usually calculated, having the most value

in this system (while in neighboring sedentary communities, Persian and

Byzantine gold and silver coins were being used more and more frequent-

ly). The development of a money economy in the trading cities was obvi-

ously a direct outcome of their incorporation into a long-distance tradingsystem involving India, East Africa, Egypt, Persia, and Byzantium.

The growth of the abstract system of money must be seen in the con-

text of the fact that little of the traded commodities were locally con-

sumed, and when they were, they often were not part of a subsistence

economy. In this respect, the value assigned to a commodity involved an

external system of reference. This external system—empire’s money—is

reimported and assigned a local value that, because of local lack of experi-

ence of its genesis and meaning, becomes abstracted.

The transmutation of the camel itself from a means of exchange into

a commodity occasioned the commodification of other products. The

annual caravans to the northern frontiers carried gold, precious stones,

ivory, wood, spices, cotton, and silk from India; incense, ebony, ostrich

feathers, gold, ivory, and perhaps grains from east Africa; incense, myrrh,

and other spices from Yemen; gum from Zufar; cereals from Yamama; and

pearls from the coast of Bahrain, as well as cattle, leather, and a wide vari-ety of clothes, fats, and medicines.8 The camel, as the means of transpor-

tation of all such commodities, became itself a commodity-transporting

commodity. The camel’s status as a commodity was enhanced to the ex-

tent that it enabled the creation of other commodities. The main differ-

ence between the camel and the other commodities was located at the

edges of the desert itself: The means of transportation remained, because

of its biological limitations, a strictly internal item of value. On the other

hand, transported commodities’ values were determined at the borderswith the empire, where the external world began.Whereas the value of the

means of transportation outside the world of the peninsula was limited




by its inability to adapt to the outside ecology, the value of the transport-

ed goods inside the peninsula was limited by their meager diffusion into

the world of the inside, especially among the nomads. This last transition,

it must be noted, has cultural as well as strictly economic foundations, as

it includes generalizing the acceptance of money, as opposed or in addi-

tion to barter exchange. What was in order then was a reorientation of the

mind to a notion of abstract valuation of objects in the form uniquely

provided by money. In what follows, I will suggest some theoretical

grounds for the possibility of such a transformation, particularly in terms

of the trade economy in question.

Partially following Marx, Georg Simmel argued that money was uniquely capable of bringing the chaotic flux of objects in the world into the realm

of a standardized law of value. That is, the value of an object would be as-

certained not in the context of its unique occurrence but, rather, on the

basis of its form. This form can be discerned only when the object is con-

sidered as but an incident of a more general type to which it is seen to be-

long.9 As an adventure in abstraction, money establishes both a distance

from the object and a link to it at one and the same time. That is, since

value is an addition to the objective being of the object (“like shade and

light”) and since the object itself is indifferent to the value added upon its

objective existence, such value cannot be determined with respect to the

essence of the object. Therefore, the mind seeks a ground for value that

could nevertheless possess the same certitude as objective existence. In

other words, the source of value must be sought outside of the mind that

is pondering the question of value. The mind then objectifies the addition

of value by establishing a universal way of calculating it whereby the valueis seen as being shared by other persons considering the same object. And

since this monetary form of valuation refers not to the essence of the ob-

ject but to the method of valuation that trading partners have in common,

the question of monetary value becomes intrinsically a question of social

life and social communication.

What is of concern to us is the assertion that one of the most successful

efforts at sedentarization in the barren terrain under consideration re-

quired a transition into a trade-based economy that, because of the vastmultiplicity of communities that engaged in it, had to be founded upon a

generalized abstraction toward commodities as entailed in the experience




of money. Such a transition cannot be located at an exact moment in

time, which is often the obsession of historians, but must be sought along

a trajectory of consciousness. This trajectory can be conceived of in terms

of a diachronic continuum whereby the value-laden objects begin to have

varying impacts on society’s way of conceiving of the world. A prelimi-

nary cognitive trajectory can be roughly suggested by the following gen-

eral steps:10

1. Once the value is added to an object, the object begins to be seen more

and more in the context of this value and not as a pure, self-enclosed ob-

ject. Value determines what and how objects will be seen.11 The particular

system of economic values prevalent in the trading community of Mecca is

clearly recognized in the Qur’an, but in a way that identifies the hitherto

unrecognized source of such values: Objects in the world are valuable not

because of any intrinsic quality but primarily because of the illusory

appeal imposed upon them by Allah: “Men are [made to be] tempted

[zuyyina lin-nas ] by the lure of women and offspring, of hoarded trea-

sures of gold and silver, of splendid horses, cattle, and [crops]. These are

the comforts of this life, but far better is the return to God.”12

What stands out most clearly here is that God includes women and off-spring among the known means of survival or, so to speak, with elements

of use and exchange in the economy. Thus, such discourse integrates

items of value in the world not so much into a system of exchange as into

the essentials of the production and reproduction of life in the first place,

and then within the system of value of a sedentary, commerce-based com-

munity. The preoccupation with self-preservation did not consist solely

of crude economy: It was in the parallel product of human intimacy, theoffspring, that an existent network for wealth accumulation recognized its

eternal renewability.

The items of value enumerated in the verse cited above are not meant

to be strictly equivalent to each other, however. The exposition deals with

both solid and ephemeral items of wealth and prestige, beginning with

monetized treasures and ending with crops. The order in which such items

are listed is significant. The recognized importance of hoarded treasure

speaks to a society whose economy is based on monetary rather thanbarter exchange, especially because hoarding indicates that the value of

such treasure is trusted not to disappear in a future that is expected to




continue to be sedentary. Next listed are the splendid horses, which were

used neither for travel in the desert nor as pastoral assets but, most im-

portantly, in tribal warfare. Third came the pastoral assets, and at the end

of the list, the fruits of sedentary agriculture. Those different forms of

wealth referred to different societies. In a way, their comprehensive listing

in one condensed passage spelled out an attempt to identify a transcen-

dental and more than simply local origin of economic value. In an age

when abstract methods of assessing and recognizing economic value were

being introduced, the divine effort consisted of precisely confirming such

values. This was done—at least in this instance—by taking the effort to

impose values on things away from both instinctive human proclivities

and objective existence of commodities, providing the faithful mind withthe ability to recognize a divine source for both spheres.13

The fundamentally sedentary nature of such a mode of thinking can

best be appreciated by visiting comparable images of value in the no-

madic ode. In the odes, items of values are passing and perishable rather

than “hoarded,” stabilized, or listed in a universal order. In the ode, the

item of value in the world is that which is lost repeatedly: a ruined abode,

a departed lover, or a depleted, haunted animal or human actor. Those

who spend their life accumulating treasures are observed to die just as do

those who live in destitution, as Tarafa most eloquently observes. The

camel, the highest and most stable item of value in the ode, is conceived of

not as a means of exchange but, rather, as an enabler of life, itself often

being on the verge of perishing. It is the means by which the wanderer

moves perpetually away from the possibilities of discerning values in ab-

stract themes.14

2. Economic values in a trading community are those that define the com-

munity as one of traders. The significant aspect of the emergence of such

a self-definition consists of how it supersedes other, apparently normative

definitions of community—for example, those based on blood lineage,

alliance, joint ownership of land, or adherence to a specific deity. Supra-

individual self-definition requires a basis of commonality that would allow

such a “social fact” (in the Durkheimian sense) to appear to be an un-

chosen norm, while at the same time basing the collective self-definitionon the practice upon which the community regards itself to be founded.

One of the bases of such a value system, money, stands for a communal




and shared comprehension of exchange values. Therefore, and pace Max

Weber, money is not an example of means becoming ends but, rather, a

communal agreement on a shared meaning for the essence of an object

that could only appear as value. It is the guarantee that all would think

about the object’s value in the same terms and according to the same rules

and that there are no other devious or hidden means (that is, means un-

known to others) by which any one person could know the object better

than did others. Money means that the potentially commodifiable objects

that are strewn upon the earth appear to a communal mind only when

endowed with value.

Here, rules by which values are measured become the object of negoti-

ation involving external as well as internal dynamics. Several rudimentary standards for commodity exchange developed as a consequence of the in-

troduction of long-distance trade in western Arabia.15 The Arabs contin-

ued to use Persian and Roman coins until the advent of the Islamic state.

However, the infusion of such coins eventually called for the creation of

local standards for the adjudication of their values.16 Such a dynamic of

valuation shows that the development of local standards is not only a re-

sponse to the plethora of value measurements of the outside world but

also a recognition of the need to develop one’s own abstraction as a result.

The development of such a value system, in turn, grounds the commu-

nity upon a new system of relations and rights, so that prior values that

were fundamental to communal definition—for example, tribal solidarity

(‘asabiyyah)—either become subordinate to such a system or are inte-

grated into it. This is abundantly clear in Muhammad’s eventual war

against Mecca, which is interesting in two respects: First, it indicated that

the new abstract method of appreciating the world had so significantly downplayed ‘asabiyyah that intratribal warfare (and in this case, using

“outsiders” against one’s own tribe) had become possible.17 Second,

Muhammad’s war against Mecca was also a new kind of war, clearly dis-

tinct from the nomadic ghazw. Mahmood Ibrahim makes the significant

point that, unlike in the ghazw situation, Muhammad’s conquest of Mecca

did not end in plundering the city (contrary to the wishes of many of the

nomads in his army) but, rather, in sanctifying and Islamicizing Meccan

capital and private property, which were retained by their owners. Thisconcomitant redefinition of the nature of warfare was evident elsewhere

throughout Arabia afterward, as Muhammad was willing to keep local




rulers and local wealth in place—including the Christian Najran—subject

to taxation, which here represents a new level of economic organization.18

3. The trading community does not emerge simply because of a prolifera-

tion of objects seen to be valuable but also because the value of such objects resides in their exchangeability. Such a stipulation involves what can

be called a “second order” abstraction: The value that a community dis-

cerns in an object is in essence the value placed upon it by another com-

munity with which the first then conducts an exchange. That is, the trad-

ing community is capable of seeing the object as valuable not only because

of the value it places on it but also—and sometimes only—because of its

ability to see the value that outsiders to the community place on it.

In this sense, the ability to discern others’ values also means that the

exchange is an exchange of ideas and worldviews, and not just commodi-

ties. What is of further interest in this respect is that such a grand ex-

change takes place, as in the case under examination, in a largely non-

coercive environment. As mentioned before, Mecca’s trade partners were

hardly in a position to coerce the city, given its location deep in the

desert, which spared it the fate of similar trading communities that were

closer to imperial frontiers.19

This context of noncoercion meant that avariety of ideologies, cosmologies, and spiritualities could intermix in a

pluralistic environment that formed the backbone of paganism. More-

over, such a pluralism meant that the textual and seemingly closed beliefs

of “others” (such as Christians and Jews) or transcendental trends (such

as Hanifism [a group of eclectic reform trends] and the idea of Allah it-

self) could be treated as experiments and possible components of pagan

theodicy itself rather than as exclusive totalities. This was the spiritual

status quo in Mecca, which did not even so much reject Muhammad’s

Allah (and it was on occasions even prepared to offer him a special status

among its other objects of worship) as it did a claim to exclusive mono-

theism transmitted through a regular human messenger.

4. As the objects of trade enter into a circulation cycle, their value comes

to consist of their capacity to remain in at least potential circulation. That

is, in order to maintain a value, that is, in order to continue to be dis-

cernible, the object must always present itself as an object of desire—andthus potential possession—by another person, even if that “other person”

has not seen or heard of the object. The desire of a hypostasized Other for




the object must be posited for the object to retain its status as a commod-

ity. Such a hypostatization involves what might be called a “third order”

abstraction, that is, presuming the knowledge by an unknown person of

the value of the object.

Such a presumption is fundamental for understanding trade as a con-

tinually expansive enterprise, which spreads until it becomes what in

today’s parlance is often called a “world system.” The fundamental idea

here concerns not so much the expansion of the “economy” itself as the

development of the cognitive prerequisites upon which such an expan-

sion is based. Namely, this expansion—especially in terms of territory and

participants, rather than simply volume—is grounded upon a posited uni-

versalism of desire for trade objects. This universalism, in turn, furnishesone of the grounds for thoughts concerned with universal values. Thus, at

this juncture we have a presumption of universal desire, coupled with a

pluralist ethic born out of the context of impossibility of coercion in that

particular system.

5. The confoundment at one point in time of the stipulations just out-

lined establishes an unbridgeable mental distance from the object endowed

with value. That is, the source of value is seen to reside outside of themind and in the community, or outside of a trading community and in

the Other with whom it conducts its commerce, or outside of both and in

a hypostasized universal realm of the potential. As such, money provides

for the possibility of a universal link, which then becomes the meaning of

the value of the object over and above its individual occurrences and over

and above the possibilities of individual experience of the object.

This means that in the context of trade as such, only a link to the objectis maintained, not the object itself. That is, when money crosses the dis-

tance between the mind and the object, it places itself at the site of its

value, thereby making it impossible for the object’s value to appear in any

form other than that of money. The experience of the object itself is

always deferred and replaced by the promise instigated in the experience

of a mere link to it. The trauma of such an indefinite deferral stems from

what had begun as a value orienting one’s attention to what could then be

experienced only along the road to it. Simmel implies that only when theworld is accepted as forms rather than a constellation of essences could

such a trauma be overcome.20




This trajectory of form is evident in our story in the increasing men-

tal departure in the sedentary community from the materialism of the

mu‘allaqat (odes)—even though the mu‘allaqat themselves furnished a

tradition of formalizing experiences deemed profound. The move was

part of a continuum of abstraction that can be seen in the emergence of

Hanifism and other mystical and meditative trends in pre-Islamic times.

The trajectory is also apparent in the increasing disenchantment with

the physical idols, a state of affairs that garnered for Islam its first few

recruits in Mecca. The Qur’an clearly makes the point by expressing

bewilderment at how man could worship objects that he himself had

made,21 that is, objects whose value was a product of direct human in-

vestment rather than inscribed in distanced “forms” (of deities) that onecould approach only through links—as prefigured in the experience of

monetized trade.

6. Therefore, money is one of the experiences of a community that,

through the history of the community’s experimentation with concepts

of collective valuation, regularly posits abstract links to pertinent objects

in its world. But because of the abstract nature of the link, the community

becomes incapable of experiencing anything other than the link itself; andfrom then on, the essence of the object is indefinitely distanced. This dis-

tancing persists as a trace of unease, which becomes the learned way of

experiencing objects in the world. Thus the experience of “traces”of value

no longer follows the dynamic observed in the mu‘allaqa, where a trace of

a ruined site was accepted as evidence of a material end of desire. In the

pre-Islamic ode, material traces of the past, notably residence, only certi-

fied the normatively tragic meaning of existence. The traditional shed-ding of tears at such a site, which commenced the ode, did not address the

deferral of experiencing objects of longing, as in the emerging trade-based

communities. Rather, it sealed an awareness that such an experience had

already occurred and that it would not be repeated.

Oftentimes, such experiences are totalized and given a meaning or a

voice or a legitimation from a source that is capable of legitimizing expe-

riences of nonfulfillment, capable of nullifying or denying them, and ca-

pable of promising an eventual freedom from a collectively felt estrange-ment from objects. The search for such a source is evidenced in the

pre-Islamic religious rituals that were concerned with establishing a con-




nection with it, such as the pilgrimage chants (to be discussed in Chap-

ter 4) that unified the community with its creator. Like the experience of

value itself, this source is located outside of all domains over which it is to

have jurisdiction. God coalesces at that site.

These remarks chart out a sociocognitive course for the emergence of a

novel method of pondering the status of objects in the world, a method

that could accompany the social experience of money. The background of

the discussion is the assumption that the kind of sedentarization that is

historically most associated with the rise of Islam occasioned a deep in-

volvement in and dependence on trade for survival. This trade emerged

out of a surrounding context of a resourceless nature and an originally

nomadic society and world outlook, both of which seem to preclude the

types of abstraction and valuation of objects described here. Such experi-

ences of thinking should not be regarded as historical events in the nar-

row sense of the word; that is, no date could be given for the transition

from one way of thinking into another. One could at best outline dia-

chronic continua that would show, for instance, that various moments of

the scheme described above had coexisted with beliefs that were diametri-

cally opposed to them. These are the experiences in life that we refer to,for instance, as moments of spiritual tension.

Side by side with the emergence of long-distance trade, an intertribal

trade within Arabia began to emerge around the seasonal suqs (market-

places).22 The suqs forged regular, organized links between the sedentary

societies of the peninsula. They also furnished the material backbone for

the emergence of a set of semilegal, semireligious rules that prefigured the

later formation of the Islamic central state and its apparatus. Most impor-tantly, such rules included the prohibition of fighting and raiding for four

months of the year (ashhur haram, “the forbidden months”) which hap-

pened to be the months during which all of the suqs of Hijaz and more

than half of the suqs in the peninsula were held. Some religious concepts

entailing a regularity of path or time, such as pilgrimage, developed paral-

lel to the trade cycle and in a way that acknowledged the central role of

Mecca in both regards. The commercial activity increased rapidly around

Mecca as the pre-Islamic pilgrimage season neared, culminating in thegreat suq of ‘Ukaz, whereafter the pilgrimage to the nearby haram (sanc-

tuary) in Mecca took place.




Intermediary trade, thus, became the most important capital-accumu-

lating occupation in the otherwise largely barren land of western Arabia.

Some revisionist historians, most recently led by Patricia Crone, labor

tirelessly to cast doubt on the size of Meccan trade. But they usually miss

the main point here, which is that even if it is granted that the size of the

trade was smaller than is usually thought, trade made possible capital

accumulation and consequently social transformation. In a different but

methodologically pertinent context, Fernand Braudel effectively demon-

strated in Civilization and Capitalism that in a nascent world system, it

was precisely the exclusion from trade of the great majority of the popu-

lation that allowed for a concentration of profit and thus facilitated

the emergence of capital surplus in society and among distinct elites.23

Once it was formed, however, such a surplus had a pivotal role to play in

grand social transformations. Furthermore, trade clearly left its imprint

everywhere on the emerging sedentarism. The name of “Quraysh” can

be traced, as many reports contend, from taqarrush, a word descriptive of

accumulating and gaining.24 Except in a few rare oases, such as Ta’if, agri-

culture played no significant role in the economic life of Najd and Hijaz.

Al-Mas‘udi reports that the organizing principle of the pre-Islamic calen-

dar had no relationship to seasons,25 whose change meant little to a non-

agricultural society.26

Long-distance trade gradually transformed social and political life.

The two centuries preceding Islam witnessed both the stabilization of the

sedentary society and its increasing complexity, especially in Mecca.

Throughout such developments, nomadic society remained excluded, de-

fiant, and unchangeable. This was most evident in the crushing failure of

the only monarchical experiment among the nomads, namely that of theKinda tribes during the first half of the sixth century a.d. in Najd and

its surroundings. Some intermediary societies, seminomadic and semi-

sedentary, continued their transitional experimentation; Yathrib, which

retained much of its Bedouin character, housed many fortifications

that were used in the recurrent outbreaks of war between its main tribes.27

The existence of agriculture in some colonies near Yathrib—later to be

renamed Medina—apparently perpetuated aspects of Bedouin mentality

and lifestyle; on the other hand, Mecca was forced, because of the barren-ness of its surroundings, to rely exclusively on trade. Mecca was therefore

forced to follow a policy of absolute neutrality and to unwaveringly insist




on preserving peace in the city at all costs. The strength of the populous

tribe of Quraysh was sufficient to guarantee peace within the boundaries

of Mecca and its haram.28

Quraysh was the tribe most interested in preserving peace in general

and during the sacred months in particular, the period when the most im-

portant commercial activities in the peninsula took place. Róbert Simon

charts out a process through which Mecca emerged as the supreme trade

center, a process entailing the successive elimination of the city’s potential

and actual competitors.29 Although this is true to a certain extent, one must

keep in mind—since this point is significant in terms of the ideological

transformation and political self-concept of the city—that such an elimi-

nation of competitors was never done by Mecca itself. The disuse of thetrade routes in Asia, the trials of the maritime route in the Red Sea, and

the decline of Yemen, the northern frontier cities, and other trading pen-

insular tribes were outcomes of conflicts of which Mecca was certainly the

beneficiary though neither a participant nor even an instigator.

The only possible exception is the so-called hurub al-fijar (sinful wars),

when Quraysh was forced into a fight with the Hawazen tribal confedera-

tion during the sacred months, an episode that Simon discusses in the

context of the struggle to eliminate competitors.30 What is important

here, however, is that during that episode, Mecca is reported to have been

defending itself rather than actively eliminating others, as it was evidently

forced into a fight after having opted to withdraw, ostensibly out of respect

for the sacred month—a concept that Hawazen did not regard.31 Thus in

this case, as well as in the case of Abraha’s campaign, the city was in fact

seeking not so much to eliminate competitors as to protect itself from

elimination by others. In both cases, there is an evident element of spiri-tual self-defense; in Mecca—significantly, in spite of its victory—hurub

al-fijar were seen as being fundamentally sinful rather than heroic wars,

and Abraha’s failure was traced to divine protection rather than to the

city’s own effort.

The concept that peace should be observed during forbidden months,

as a pseudospiritual accompaniment to trade, was often difficult to en-

force. For many nomads, the concept meant little, especially if the speci-

fied months coincided with periods during which they needed to resort toraiding as a means of survival, or if they were excluded from the trade in-

volved.32 There is also some evidence to suggest that some tribes, though




accepting the principle, contested the designation of specific months as

being forbidden.33 It is significant in this respect that at a later stage, Islam

confirmed the Meccan version of the sacred months and prohibited the

alternatives. In any case, observing the forbidden months was a sedentary,

trade-oriented preoccupation, which for the nomads induced potential

losses for one third of the year.34

As Mecca gained prominence in trade, its religious status was likewise

enhanced. As far as ideological or spiritual developments are concerned, it

is perhaps not so much the volume of trade in Mecca or even the centrali-

ty of Mecca to trade that is so significant. More important than centrality

is the circulatory nature of the suq cycle. Circularity signifies periodicity of

exposure of a variety of societies to an annually renewable routine. Thefact that the process of trade involved a seasonal rotation around the

peninsula, so that it came back to Mecca and proceeded out of it again,

meant that the models of sociopolitical or spiritual organization of the

trading community could involve not only models learned from relatively

distant imperial centers (Byzantium, Persia, Abyssinia) but also those

engendered by more dynamic and less controllable nomadic and semi-

sedentary Arab experiences. The idea of circularity here is most evident in

pilgrimage, which was not simply a visit to a distant and aloof center of

spirituality but also a periodic culmination of a cycle of peninsular trade.

The idea of circularity—as opposed to centrality—is further enshrined

in the fact that the pilgrims paid respect not so much to Mecca’s haram

itself as to their own tribal idols and in the fact that they chanted their

own tribally distinct chants within the common site of pilgrimage. Neither

Mecca nor its haram were in themselves the objects of veneration or wor-

ship; they simply housed the objects of worship of recognized others. TheArabic word for pilgrimage, hajj, is traced in one authoritative report not

to any intrinsic spiritual idea but, rather, to a distinctly geographic idea

denoting a regular, well-traversed route.35

Nearly all classical authorities attribute the construction of the haram

in its pre-Islamic form to the Qurayshan chief Qusay Ibn Kilab,36 whose

appearance seems to coincide with the early periods of Meccans’ direct

engagement in long-distance trade. The foundation of a spiritual context

for trade is well documented in the sources and is evident in many penin-sular locations before or around the time of Mecca’s prominence. Bedouins

from Banu Ghatfan are reported to have built a haram in Tuhama explicitly




after the Meccan model in order to protect their newly acquired posses-

sions—garnered by raiding—from loss in further wars. As a result, Mecca

dispatched an expedition that aimed at despoiling a haram that might

have competed with its own.37 Other reports mention that the Abyssin-

ians, during their occupation of the economically faltering Yemen in the

sixth century, sought to build a haram there in a desperate attempt to

redirect the pilgrimage route, and subsequently the suq cycle, to Yemen.38

Thus, many peninsular markets evidently took place in locales of cultic

importance. R. B. Serjeant compared the haram of Mecca to sanctified

sites in southern Arabia known as hawta, whose foundation was traced

to venerated holy men, where bloodshed and the cutting of trees were

forbidden, and where traders could meet and haggle in safety.39

Other re-ports trace the decline of the economic status of some suqs to their loss of

cultic prestige.40

mecca

Such a spiritual organization of economic life, furthermore, seems to have

entailed some institutionalized division of labor that actively promoted

and maintained it. According to tradition, Qusay—Mecca’s purported

Qurayshan settler—added a whole set of costly functions related to the

service of the haram and its pilgrims, the mere commitment to which

would indicate the presence of wealth. Each of the five functions41 pre-

supposed that its holder was a person of political or economic power.

Qusay’s further establishment of Dar an-Nadwah as an institution for

intratribal consultation and as a site of common celebrations and func-

tions can be seen as an indication of the subsequent sociopolitical devel-opment of Meccan society.

The emerging need for all such functions and institutions is related in

many ways to Mecca’s increasing wealth and importance. But they also

point to another parallel internal development, namely, the emergent

class division within Quraysh itself. The sources trace class division to

that time, along with the division of the tribe into Abateh and Zawaher,

signified by residential segregation. The wealthier and more noble Abateh

lived in the neighborhood of the haram, whereas the less fortunateZawaher inhabited the rest of Mecca and the mountain terrain sur-

rounding it. In that separation, the newly sedentarized nomad was being




introduced to a hitherto rare phenomenon: visible and enduring sym-

bols of class divisions.

Such divisions took root within a context of an almost-exclusive de-

pendence on trade as the source of livelihood for all classes of inhabitants.

(Evidence exists to suggest that Mecca lacked not only agriculture but

even simple craftsmanship.)42 This dependence, in turn, gave birth to new

ways of approaching the connections between “labor” and entitlement to

wealth. Trade itself was far from being an occupation universally held in

high esteem. There are poetic references to its connection to avarice, dis-

dain, and other negative attributes.43 Trade as wealth legitimizing labor

posed a novel ideological preoccupation, since it was not rooted in the

older and more accepted ideas of labor permeating both agriculturalcolonies and nomadic pastoral and ghazw economy.

There are a couple of reports relevant to this problematic, both of

which concern Ta’if. One mentions that Quraysh, inhabiting the inhos-

pitable terrain of Mecca, offered to share the sacred haram with Thaqif

of Ta’if, in exchange for the latter’s sharing their fertile Wadi Wajj with

Quraysh.44 Such a proposal would indicate first that the status of the

haram, sacred as it was, did not set it far apart from other directly nego-

tiable items of exchange. Rather, the offer itself is generally consistent

with the flexible attitudes of pagan pluralism that had enshrined Mecca’s

status in the peninsula. Incidentally, it also points to one of the sources of

Hanifism and eventually Islam, as mystical and experimental discourses

in search of a more solidly grounded and less negotiable source of divini-

ty. Second, the report also indicates that Mecca was aware of its vulnera-

bility due to its exclusive dependence on trade. This continuing feeling of

vulnerability, in turn, was one of the grounds that Islam sought to addressas well, as will be elaborated later.

Thaqif eventually rejected Mecca’s offer on a very illuminating ground:

The reason given was articulated in terms of labor entitlement; whereas

Thaqif had made Wadi Wajj into what it became through their labor,

Quraysh had simply inherited a haram that had been founded by Abraham

rather than building or earning it through the tribe’s labor. It is significant

to note that the argument did not directly compare the timely values of

the haram and Wadi Wajj; neither did it directly contest the spiritual sig-nificance of the haram. Rather, it grounded the comparison on two main

sources: (1) the origins of values in terms of labor and (2) the right to




negotiate such values. In this regard, the haram was no longer seen as

Quraysh’s to barter away or negotiate, since its value was embedded in the

labor that had gone into establishing it and since the tribe was not party

to such labor—not even in terms of (exclusive) genealogy. Such a view

was consistent, furthermore, with the aforementioned tradition of ascrib-

ing the genesis of cultic/trade sites to transtribal holy men.

Thus, Thaqif’s rejection of the offer was based not so much on the in-

ferior value of the haram compared to Wadi Wajj as on their view that

transformative labor and the ex post facto transtribal shrines belonged to

different logical spheres and were thus incomparable, or inexchangeable.

It is significant, of course, that Quraysh evidently thought otherwise. For

it was clear from Quraysh’s perspective that the value of the haram hadbeen historically transformed by Quraysh’s labor, which included not

simply regular upkeep but, more importantly, the gradual establishment

of a trade and pilgrimage cycle that aggrandized the stature of the shrine

and made it over time the expansive house of many tribally specific ob-

jects of worship. As such, although the foundation of the haram was not

claimed by Quraysh—and it could not claim it, if for no other reason than

its necessarily transtribal claim—Quraysh was convinced of the haram’s

comparability to Wadi Wajj precisely on the grounds of labor (and obvi-

ously not holiness per se).

Thus we have here two conceptions of labor that did not communicate

or reinforce each other across the divide between trading and agricultural

communities. The agricultural logic is further illustrated in another report,

also concerning Ta’if but not Mecca this time, which connects a certain

formulation of labor to the idea of “right.” Ta’if was originally claimed by

two matrilineally related tribes, ‘Amer and Thaqif, with the latter beingthe latecomers and the former holding a recognized “right” to the land.

The reports emphasize that ‘Amer was nonetheless largely nomadic,

spending only the summer in the elevated gardens of what came to be

known as Ta’if and winters pasturing their flocks in the open expanses of

Najd. Their relatives of Thaqif, having taken note of such a dynamic and

becoming more aware of the agricultural potential of the area, offered

to cultivate and improve it on a continuous, residential basis and in re-

turn split the harvest with ‘Amer. The right of each tribe to half of the pro-duce was explicitly articulated in terms of two distinct categories: Thaqif

would receive one half because of their labor, ‘Amer would receive the




other half because of their right to the land. The system operated for

many years. As the colony prospered, however, and the Thaqif grew in

number and strength, they excluded the absentee ‘Amer owners, along with

branches from Thaqif itself in the process.45

In the absence of a central political feudal authority to enforce it, the

notion of rightful ownership can be abstracted and assigned to an absen-

tee landlord only for as long as mutual defense obligations warrant it.

Such a voluntary feudalism cannot, of course, be enforced indefinitely

without the category of “right” being eventually contested on the grounds

of “labor,” as evidently happened in this case. Again, right (and the exclu-

sion from it) was grounded in the ability to transform nature rather than

on ancestral claims, which, although originally recognized, held only foras long as the territory in question remained untransformed or relatively

defenseless.

It is in the context of established ideas of labor and right that the emer-

gence of a Meccan trade economy must be ascertained, especially if one is

concerned about its ideological connotations and problems. There is little

in the ancient history of Mecca that does not link it to trade. Its founda-

tion as a caravan station in an arid environment was made possible by the

discovery of a large underground water source, Zamzam (eventually en-

shrined within the Islamic pilgrimage rituals), which is recorded to have

been known and used for many centuries before Islam. As time went on,

more wells were dug, and their discovery was both a result of the expan-

sion of the city and a key factor in maintaining it.46

The reports mention that the site was successively controlled by Jurham,

Khuza‘ah, and finally Quraysh, even though the evidence for intertribal

marriages indicates long periods of neighborly coexistence.47

The construc-tion of permanent dwellings, however, is traced to Quraysh, personified by

the city-building, semimythical Qusay Ibn Kilab. As already mentioned,

this sedentarization was also accompanied by a class-based residential divi-

sion and the growth of functions and responsibilities pertaining to spiritual

and consultative city life. Together with this development, the sanctity of

the haram of Mecca began to be amplified, as it was to play a decisive role in

regulating the neutrality and peace that were essential for trade. Bloody

battles among tribes in and around the site were not unknown beforeQusay’s days, and the universal respect for the haram was apparently long

in the coming, and it came single-handedly through Meccans’ efforts.48




In addition to the Abateh-Zawaher distinction, a third caste, centering

on the line of descent from Qusay, topped the Qurayshan hierarchy and

offered a hereditary organizational vehicle for running the emergent poli-

tics of spirituality in Mecca. The sources clearly associate Qusay’s sedenta-

rization with the simultaneous introduction of an administrative appara-

tus. Dar an-Nadwah, said to be the first house to be built in Mecca after its

sedentarization by Quraysh during Qusay’s days, was also a communal

headquarters. Everything of significance to the community was done in it,

from marriages to declarations of war. Dar an-Nadwah functioned often

partially according to nomadic principles, with the chiefs of the various

clans participating in making decisions, which in turn were not binding

unless agreed to unanimously. Like the principle of unanimity, otherBedouin concepts of governance were entertained in a somewhat modi-

fied form. The seniority rule around Dar an-Nadwah prescribed that with

the exception of Qusay’s sons, no Qurayshan under forty years of age was

allowed to enter.49 The exclusion of Qusay’s sons from an ancient rule of

hierarchy was indicative of the emergence of new criteria for eminence.

It signified the addition to the old notion of social status, which emanated

primarily from tribal service and secondarily from lineage, elements of

leadership that were more personal rather than collective. Ibrahim traces

such a development of personal leadership to the growth of merchant

capital, which precludes the earlier collectivist and community-oriented

credentials for prominence.50

As they became the economic and political elite in the gradually polar-

izing society of Mecca, Qusay’s sons also inherited all of the spiritual func-

tions that their father had monopolized. It is perhaps indicative of the

emergence of a new form of spirituality, and of its ties to sociopoliticalpowers, that all of Qusay’s sons’ names begin with “‘Abd ” (worshipper of),

unlike Qusay’s ancestors. The contentions attendant on the struggle over

the control of the haram functions was resolved peacefully, which accorded

with the image of the city’s sanctity, and in a way that led to increasing plu-

ralism of duties until Muhammad’s time. The five functions were allocated

to different descendants, and eventually about ten more functions were

created and allocated to various branches of the tribe, thereby appeasing

them and assuring each of a certain degree of influence and prestige.Meccan trade was buttressed by an array of spiritual and directly eco-

nomic arrangements, ranging from sanctifying the city, housing tribal




cults (hums ), and forging internal as well as external agreements to regu-

late trade. Those controlling haram services were leading traders at the

same time, as political and economic power went hand in hand in the

most naked way.51 The haram was an institution of fundamental impor-

tance for the city: It helped to preserve peace in Mecca and confirm its

neutrality in the peninsula, securing thereby friendly relations with most

of the peninsula’s inhabitants. In the process, the city began to gradually

gain a widespread acceptance for its proclaimed spiritual role. The most

striking example in this respect is the role of siqayah and rifadah, the

two most important of the sixteen or so service functions listed in con-

nection to the haram before Islam. By providing the basic necessities of

life, food and drink, the Meccans forged broad informal alliances with bothBedouins and sedentaries, thus facilitating the passage of their caravans

through various territories. Thus the Bedouins’ valorization of open hos-

pitality, so crucial to the life of wandering and unpredictability, was firm-

ly incorporated and organized in the ethic of a city that had to deal practi-

cally with its anarchic surroundings.52 The first pre-Islamic taxation in

Mecca, which helped cover the cost of the rifadah, was a direct outcome of

such a necessity.53 Testifying to their undeniable importance, such func-

tions were always held by some of the wealthiest individuals in Quraysh.

In order to smooth out or even guarantee the functioning of such a

system as a whole, a few morally and materially binding agreements were

attempted. The first such recorded agreement resolved a conflict between

the allies of the different sons of Qusay, who opted instead for a peaceful

division of political authority in Mecca afterward in a way that satisfied

most of the branches of Quraysh and maintained peace and order in

Mecca until Muhammad’s time. But more economically important wasthe agreement by major Qurayshan leaders known as hilf al-fudul (pact of

the virtuous ones), of which Muhammad was said to have been an enthu-

siastic supporter (before his revelation). Hilf al-fudul was an agreement

that guaranteed the proper collection of due credit and rights for all mer-

chants who dealt in Mecca. There are indications that the agreement only

formalized established traditions regarding rights and credit relations; by

the time one incident forced it back into relevance, it had almost become

forgotten.54

Traditional accounts mention that in the earlier periods, profits from

external trade were divided up equally among Qurayshans.55 This report




must be seen in the context of others concerning the practice of i‘tifad ,

whereby an individual failed merchant voluntarily banished himself and

his family from the community and went away to starve to death.56 This

practice is clearly an extreme manifestation of an existent ethic of individu-

alized destiny, in a context where commerce began to introduce novel

ideas regarding rights and allocations in the community. The emergence

of a stable trading society in Mecca itself introduced such novel concepts

regarding the nature of collective bonds. Here, class structure began to

form a second line of differentiation in addition to, or sometimes in op-

position to, clan differentiations. In this light, wealth differentiation with-

in the clan became possible, and thus so did such practices as lending to

a relative.57

This development often superimposed class distinctions upon the lines

of descent of the branches of Quraysh. Tribal affiliations could be incor-

porated into and adapted to the cause of commerce, which occasionally

made lineage into another vehicle for expressing class and status position.

As members of one branch became wealthy while the branch continued

to exist as a distinct social entity, with clearly defined norms governing

relations with the other branches, the new wealth became not only an ad-

ditional recognizable feature of the branch as a whole but appeared to be

most securely utilizable within it as well. The variety of preexisting haram

service functions operated precisely in this manner: They were allocated

to individuals on the basis of branch affiliation, eventually perpetuating

and spiritualizing a status quo, as some functions were clearly more im-

portant and costly than others, and as the positions responsible for those

functions were consistently occupied by members of the more prosperous

branches.58

Thus, the relatively rapid infusion of wealth superimposed class dis-

tinctions, an idea of privileged functions, an abstraction of the world, an

impersonal conception of the market, and a knowledge of an uncon-

trolled outside environment over a social and ethical framework that could

accommodate it only precariously. The surrounding world, seen from the

city, was in a state of complete chaos, with Mecca’s competitors disinte-

grating, with the Bedouin society in a state of hopeless stagnation and

infighting, and with the great powers of the time, the Roman and PersianEmpires, tottering because of incessant wars between them, on the one

hand, and crippling internal dissent, on the other.




Seen from the outside, however, the growth of the city’s spiritual status

paralleled that of its economic status, as outlined before. The imperatives

of such a position meant that Mecca had to avoid involvement in the

many tribal disputes in the peninsula and pursue a policy of heartless

neutralism. Reports indicate that it rejected a lucrative offer of alliance

with other powerful semisedentary groups.59 The aura of the forbidden

months, which offered spiritual shelter for peninsular trade, was supple-

mented by more earthly agreements, known as ilaf, which safeguarded

long-distance trade as well. In an ilaf agreement, a trader purchased the

right to move caravans into the lands of neighboring states and engage in

commerce and in return gave a certain part of the profit or goods to local

rulers.60

Thus, with the advent of long-distance trade, the Arabs of Hijaz broke

out of their historical isolation, an isolation that is evident in their lack of

knowledge about organized polities in the region.61 The ilaf meant the

end not only of the cycle of socioeconomic stagnation but also of a politi-

cal nothingness of a barren land in which none of the neighboring powers

was interested.62 Thus, the Arabs of Hijaz began their exposure to the

world outside without being subject to any previous control by great

powers and without being influenced by the coercive potential of external

forces.

Such an exposure was undertaken instead along annual caravan routes.

The southbound caravans purchased commodities imported from India,

eastern Africa, and Bahrain, products that partially fed peninsular suqs,

before being taken northward, notably to Bostra, with the winter cara-

van.63 All that movement led to the creation of a whole array of service

activities along caravan pathways, such as security arrangements and restfacilities.64 Such services enlisted the Bedouins and semi-Bedouins (that

is, Bedouins who intermittently practiced agriculture or trade) at least

partially in the service of trade, whose dividends were thereby distributed

more widely upon the route.65

The many agreements, economic as well as spiritual, that engulfed this

trade not only indicate the growth of commercial rationality, but they

also betray the context of danger within which it took shape. The cultic

hums,66 ilaf, and other arrangements were apparently all forged within thesixth century. Simon shows that both hums and ilaf were still recent ac-

complishments by Muhammad’s time and that trade with Byzantium,




though significant, still had few established traditions around it—and

trade in the direction of Iraq was even less developed.67 The establishment

of both can be traced to the “year of the elephant,” circa a.d. 547.68 This is

significant, since that year was engraved in Meccan consciousness as a

year of great threat to the very survival of the city. It instilled both a reali-

zation of the need for an earthly protective framework to ensure the city’s

survival and a sense of otherworldly involvement in such a scheme, espe-

cially since the city survived without having to confront the invader di-

rectly. It is significant in this regard that the Muslim lore also traced

Muhammad’s birth (a.d. 570) to the year of the elephant, clearly symbol-

izing thereby the commencement of divine safekeeping of the city.

The developments in trade, thus, were taking place in a world of in-creasing political dissimulation, both inside and outside of the peninsula.

The Roman Empire was suffering from the growing strength and repeated

incursions of other kinds of nomads in Europe, from internal sectarian

frictions, from regional rebellions, and from eventual division after a.d.

395. The decay continued as war broke out between Byzantium and the

Sassanid Empire of Persia, with the northern frontiers of Arabia in Syria

and Mesopotamia becoming their battlefield. Persia itself was also suffer-

ing from symptoms of decrepitude, with internal struggles symbolized by

the conflict between various theodicies, most importantly Mazdaism and

Zoroastrianism. There is also evidence that both powers were beginning

to lose their ability to protect their own frontiers against Arab nomads

even before the Islamic conquests. The reports tell of Arab tribes who

were shocked at their own victory over imperial Persia at Dhi Qar, a battle

they engaged only hesitantly and after long trepidation.69 At roughly the

same time, the first successful major nomadic raids on Byzantium’s terri-tories in Syria and Palestine are recorded.

The increasing vulnerability of the great powers was also—as is

well noted by historians—connected to the decline of the buffer states

Ghassanides and Mundherites, which mediated between the nomads and

Byzantium and Persia, respectively. These were northern Arabian tribal

confederations that had settled in Syria and Mesopotamia around the be-

ginning of the third century a.d. Their role consisted of collecting taxes

from other Bedouins in their jurisdiction on behalf of their imperial pa-trons and protecting the peripheries of the two empires from the sporadic

nomadic assaults coming from Najd. In exchange, they received imperial




support for their semiautonomous rule. Both fizzled out later, with the

Ghassanides’ rule being abruptly discontinued toward the end of the sixth

century, at a point when many of their fellowship had settled into agricul-

tural lifestyles or become regular suppliers of soldiers to the imperial

army.70 Persia’s fledgling control over lower Mesopotamia, likewise, could

be maintained for as long as the empire successfully manipulated no-

madic rivalries, a tactic that eventually left it with no reliable allies.71 The

third central power that had some influence on the affairs in the peninsu-

la, Yemen, was also disintegrating because of a number of factors, such as

its shrinking commercial significance, the decline of its agricultural econ-

omy, the resultant emigration of many tribes, and recurrent invasions and

rebellions, which left it with a weak and uncertain political future.72

the nomadic flux

Generally, the era preceding the rise of Islam witnessed not only the emer-

gence of a particularly remunerative trade economy that consolidated and

distinguished nascent sedentarization, but also a discernible political an-

archy and lack of control in the same general area where sedentarization

throve. In this context (but not necessarily because of it), traditional

nomadic acquisition raiding (ghazw ) not only increased but often meta-

morphosed into lengthy and legendary wars. Ghazw had always been an

important component of the Bedouin economy of survival. As such, it

was usually governed by a tableaux of common ethics, which justified the

practice within the limits of absolute necessity and then in a way that left

room for the exercise of customary rapprochement rituals. These includ-

ed diyyah (blood money), a lien in the form of a number of boys given ascaptives until the diyyah was secured, or even the permission of the as-

saulting tribe to the victimized one to retaliate against specified members

of the former, who had not necessarily been direct participants in the as-

sault.73 During an individual ghazw, great care was taken to keep blood-

shed to a minimum. However, in the period immediately preceding Islam,

central and northern Arabia became more and more anarchic. Fierce and

long wars among tribes became a paramount feature of social relations.

Major wars are recorded between the tribal confederations Bakr andTaghlib, ‘Abs and Dhubyan, Aus and Khazraj, and many others. An entire

bombastic poetic heritage developed in that era, a heritage that still sur-




vives today as the most impressive literary expression of heroism and

related traits in the history of Arab Bedouins. As already mentioned, one

factor contributing to that turmoil was the collapse of the peninsular

powers that had partially mediated among the tribes, such as Yemen,

Kinda, and the northern dynasties—the last themselves becoming in-

volved in reproducing the Byzantine-Persian wars on a smaller scale.74

It was amid such surrounding pandemonium that Mecca’s long-distance

trade throve. As Syria and Mesopotamia became the battleground of

the imperial wars, the Persian land route for Indian goods destined for

Europe was abandoned. The entire intermediary trade was transferred to

Mecca, including some of the sea-borne trade of the Persian gulf.75 The

imperatives of trade made the city into a unique oasis of peace, especially as many Arabs from Najd—notably those with some wealth to protect

from the increasing unpredictability of the desert—moved to Mecca.

The exclusion of the nomads from sedentary possibilities imprinted

two imperatives on nomadic ideology: justifying nomadic lifestyle as such

and denigrating lifestyles that paraded their superiority as potential alter-

natives. In this sense, nomadic ideology accomplished two objectives. On

the one hand, it shielded the nomad from the lure of unattainable

hadarah. On the other, it provided a moral force that highlighted the

virtues of the inescapable badawah. Central to such an ideology was the

belief that continuous wandering was an essentially more honorable and

healthful way of living.76 The Bedouins’ scorn for the hadarah life is well

recorded and defended in a tradition that regarded their lifestyle to be

not merely the one worthy of mankind but also morally and physically

superior to any other.77 Generosity, hospitality, honor, contentment, and

loyalty are the traits often cited when the Bedouins boast of their lifestyle.But of special significance is their staunch adherence to a (real or imag-

ined) line of descent (nasab ), around which tribal loyalty coalesced and

which was defended at all costs.

Khazanov notes that nomadic genealogies have generally two func-

tions. First, they facilitate alliances and, conversely, “legitimize” inequality

(more precisely, they make detachment possible) among already hetero-

geneous groups. He notes the flexibility of genealogical tales, which make

assimilation between hitherto distinct clans possible through “genealogi-cal amnesia” (or reconstruction).78 Second, the formative role of genea-

logical imagination ascribed to it an essentiality that often superseded




voluntarily (and still visibly) “manufactured” links, such as those forged

through intertribal marriage.79

The law of cohesiveness of the nomadic tribe, ‘asabiyyah, developed

around the idea of nasab. It entailed unquestioning loyalty to descendants

of the same blood line. This idea, as Evans-Pritchard sums it up, offered a

framework of “ordered chaos,” offering a minimal regulator of relations

and duties between separately operating small herding groups.80 The eco-

logical conditions often determined that members of the same nasab met

each other only infrequently, but that did not have much adverse effect on

their principle of solidarity. This seeming paradox—ritual reinforcement

of blood ties in spite of the largely separate existence of small nomadic

units—is observed elsewhere and is regarded by many commentators asan adaptive strategy to overcome frequently encountered hard times.81

The limit imposed on the size of the nomadic social unit flowed from a

number of factors. The more complex social organization that a larger

size often entails—in order to ensure just allocation of collective gains

and the settling of more complicated disputes involving a larger number

of people—was fundamentally incompatible with the ecology of nomad-

ism. Such formations were not feasible in the nomadic subsistence socio-

economy, as the failure of Kinda’s monarchical experiment—to be dis-

cussed shortly—clearly illustrates.

Thus, in nomadic society it was common for one tribe to split into sev-

eral subtribes, or even rival factions, whenever the size of the unit in-

creased.82 Khazanov remarks that “all known forms of nomadic families

are closer to nuclear than to extended families.”83 The collectively wander-

ing group could not grow in size to an extent that would outstrip the

capacity of the widely dispersed oases to sustain it.84

‘Asabiyyah, thus,though often approached as a sacred principle, was not in essence an un-

breakable creed. Once a nomadic social unit grew in numbers, it split into

branches, with new ‘asabiyyahs replacing the old ones. The general nasab

then provided a loose network of alliances between various units, al-

liances that, again, were not as compulsory as they are often reputed to be

in theory.85

The limits on unit size, the fluid state of alliances, and the persistent

preoccupation with survival clearly ruled out the political and hierarchi-cal organization of nomadic society, especially when compared to neigh-

boring sedentary settlements. In terms of hierarchy, the nomadic social




unit exhibited a combination of egalitarianism and individual attention

to tribal duties. Collective consultation was the rule before any action was

taken, whether related to war, peace, transactions, or any matter that con-

cerned the community as a whole. However, once a decision was made, it

was binding on all members. Unlike in imperial and statelike polities,

such collectivism and sense of belonging operated with little reference to

hierarchical symbolism. Lacking in coercive control, the sheikh acted more

or less as an arbitrator and coordinator, with little or no executive au-

thority. Likewise, nomadic society had no built-in mechanism for heredi-

tary hierarchy: Seniority was a key factor in choosing a sheikh, and service

to the community was a key determinant of higher social status within

the tribe.Such social units were (as they still are today) at the same time “units of

production,” each having within itself a complete division of labor (corre-

sponding to what in the Marxist tradition would be called a “mode of

production”). Nearly all of the activities needed for the maintenance and

reproduction of the Bedouin lifestyle could be undertaken within Bedouin

society, virtually oblivious to what Khazanov calls the “outside world.” In

Arabia, such a largely pastoral economy was supplemented by barter in

the suqs, by ghazw, and to a certain extent by hunting. The nomad lived

on the edge of extinction, particularly in the frequent years of drought. It

is in such a context that ghazw can be understood as a periodic activity to

which the nomadic social unit could resort. Ghazw occurred primarily

within the desert territory and often along the trade routes, with infre-

quent incursions into the towns. It was strictly economical: Raids were of

very short duration and aimed primarily at direct acquisition, and blood-

shed was kept to the minimum necessary level.In an economy sustained partly by periodic wars, the reasons that were

considered legitimate for initiating a raid were lodged in an area of con-

cepts characterized by wide but flexible applicability. For example, the

most insignificant incident could be seen as leading to one’s “dishonor” or

“disgrace,” yet if war was not sought at the time of that particular inci-

dent, the diyyah provided a peaceful way of compensating for dishonor or

disgrace. And in case diyyah was not available, other outlets were made

available, as discussed before. In this way, foundational concepts like“honor” and “justice” became flexible discourses rather than objective

categories that unilaterally determined collective behavior at every turn.86




As mentioned before, the epoch immediately preceding Islam witnessed

the growth of ghazw into a more prominent element within Bedouin

economy. The reasons may have to do with the periodically increasing

demographic pressures in the desert ecology, conflict over control of the

lucrative trade routes, and the decline of the arbitrative authority and

power of the frontier and buffer statelets. As will be examined in the fol-

lowing section, on the Kinda, dynamics within nomadic society itself did

arise in order to place such sources of conflict under some control. But in

general, the epoch witnessed tribal wars of long duration replacing the

older short cycles of raiding followed by rapprochement. The most leg-

endary of the wars, the Basus war and Dahes wa l-Ghabra’ war, are report-

ed to have lasted each for forty years during the sixth century, with only afew years separating them and with the latter ending only during the life-

time of Muhammad.

The wars spread uncharacteristically to involve tribal confederations

rather than small social units. One example of this expansion of the range

of the conflict occurred during the early days of what came to be known

as the Basus war, when Taghlibites attacked branches of Bakr that had ini-

tially refused to be involved in the skirmishes, thereby enlarging the raids

into a complex war with multiple sources of claims and a wider range of

participants.87 Such conflicts, consequently, could not be ended by tradi-

tional means; they ended only when all the involved parties were com-

pletely and equally exhausted. These wars, however, did not change the

basic organizational imperatives of the nomadic social unit, with its small

size and (for most of the year) self-sufficiency. The “wars” themselves en-

tailed not permanent mobilization but, rather, orientations of conscious-

ness toward the larger collectivities. “Forty years” referred not so much toan ongoing struggle as to the duration of unsettled accounts, which some-

times during those forty years led to major battles. But in themselves,

such “wars” reemphasized the need for the wandering nomadic unit to

more consistently locate itself upon the map of larger tribal allegiances.

kinda

The need for a more sophisticated social and political organization wasfelt only when ghazw was becoming unusually and consistently promi-

nent during the second half of the fifth century. The experiment of the




“kingdom” of Kinda was the fruit of that growing tendency, as was evi-

dent in the more or less voluntary submission of the tribes to Kinda’s

central authority. The inherent structural weaknesses of such a statelike

sociopolitical organization, especially when it faced an immobile economy

and an unfavorable popular ideology, led to its ultimate collapse. What

the Bedouins wanted from that “kingdom” was impossibly simple: the ex-

tension of the bare structure of each social unit across the span of the en-

tire Bedouin society. More contemporary observations reveal the salience

of such a trope, whose ground can be found in the uncertain conditions

of survival in a unique ecology that, as one commentator notes, lead to

the definition of the family—and nothing else—“as a peaceful interior

that is protected and concealed from a disorderly exterior.”88

It is in thislight, therefore, that the paradox can be understood between, on the one

hand, the unavoidable development of a statelike structure and, on the

other, its abandonment by the nomads thereafter.

Unlike the northern dynasties, which were made possible in part by

active imperial support, Kinda represented the first record of a properly

Bedouin “monarchy.” That experiment deserves to be outlined here, not

only because it was a unique attempt at centralized nomadic self-regulation

but also because it served as a precursor for the centralizing maneuvers of

Islam that were to follow.

All accounts indicate that the desire to regulate the affairs of the in-

creasingly warring Bedouin society was behind the Bakr tribes’ initiative

that resulted in the kingdom. Significantly, the traditional narratives

explicitly locate the royal house outside of the feuding nomadic realm, in

accordance with what the nomads themselves had sought. The reports

mention that Bakr, fractured by feuds between its branches, sent a delega-tion to the Yemenite monarch asking him to be their king. He delegated

the position instead to Hijr (Akel al-Murar), the chief of Kinda tribe.89

Several explanations for such a choice are possible, including that Kinda

were of Yemenite-Hadramite origin, which might have led the Himyari

king to assume that, given the nomadic tribes’ strong ancestral attachment,

the Kinda were most capable of transmitting his influence indirectly, sav-

ing him thereby the cumbersome task of directly ruling a naturally un-

controllable and barren region.Many economically oriented commentators place the story of Kinda in

the context of Himyari commercial expansion.90 There is little evidence,




however, to indicate that the Himyari domain benefited in any economic

sense from the Kinda experiment at governorship. Unlike the Meccan ilaf

agreements, which signaled economic rather than political alliances,91

Kinda’s kingdom signaled exactly the opposite: a political alliance whose

eventual deterioration, as we shall see, was partially because of the impos-

sibility of constructing the economic foundations for it. If Himyari eco-

nomic ambitions were a factor in assigning the monarchic role to Kinda,

it is difficult to see how such ambitions could have materialized. To the

contrary, it seems that Kinda itself was so unimportant in the Himyari

scheme of things that it could subsequently scarcely rely on or expect

Himyar’s support to survive. Another, more likely reason for the choice of

Kinda may have to do with the fact that until then (that is, around themiddle of the fifth century), the tribe appears not to have been a major

participant in the ongoing tribal wars. Another factor might have been

the tribe’s large size, which could ensure the stability of a medium-sized

kingdom in Najd.92

The monarchical attempt did not last for more than a century. The

kingdom disintegrated in the middle of the sixth century, although some

small, loosely connected branches of it continued to exist until the rise of

Islam. The kingdom could not secure an ideological hold for the concept

of royalty. Its kings had no permanent headquarters; rather, they pre-

served their nomadic lifestyle, wandering with their tents and spending

much of their time hunting.93 Akel al-Murar’s successor, ‘Amru al-Maqsur,

even relinquished the title king, scaling his address down to “Sayyed [chief

of] Kinda.” It can be argued that the rebellion of the Asad tribe, in which

the last of the kings of Kinda was killed, signaled the violent explosion of

contradictions between two increasingly irreconcilable trends: on the onehand, the attempt of the rulers of Kinda to build the infrastructure of a

stable kingdom after sedentary models, a trend that included securing

regular income through taxes (etewah) levied on subjugated tribes. On

the other hand, such an attempt ran counter to nomadic society’s rejec-

tion of authority that was centralized around one dynasty and accompa-

nied by unfamiliar economic consequences.

Evidently, when they initially sought a king, the tribes did not intend to

establish a “real” kingdom as such, or even to belong to one, as much asthey intended to create a universally respected sheikh, whose function at

the level of Bedouin society as a whole would resemble the function of the




local sheikh within a single nomadic unit. He would serve as an arbiter

in disputes, maintaining a minimal amount of order and overseeing the

natural balance between war and peace, collective and individual respon-

sibilities and tasks, and the just distribution of gains. Therefore, the very

development of the hierarchical and functional aspects of a monarchical

system posed an unacceptable challenge to a nomad used to the model of

the nearly egalitarian tribe, a nomad who would submit to the tribe’s

unanimous decisions but not to the arbitrary will of its sheikh, who was

periodically forced to reduce needs to bare minimum, who could not

fathom taxation, and who relied to a certain degree on ghazw as a cyclical

supplement to his resources. In other words, the desire to regulate the af-

fairs of Bedouin society as a whole displayed no ideological reorientationsthat could justify a centralized system of hierarchical governance, all of

whose aspects contradicted the basic structures of the Bedouin way of life.

Once this contradiction came to the fore, the fate of the kingdom was

sealed.

Yet the abandonment by the governors of Kinda of the modest stance

adopted by ‘Amru al-Maqsur94 came about, significantly, not from no-

madic dynamics proper but from increasing exposure to imperial politics.

The expansion of the Kinda’s territorial domain and the deepening of the

extent of governance did not occur before the reign of al-Harith, its third

chief. The first king, Akel al-Murar, did little more than regulate the affairs

of his Bakrian constituents and recapture territories taken away from

them by the Lachmides.95 His successor, ‘Amru al-Maqsur, restricted him-

self to the territory he had inherited, opting for peaceful relations with

his neighbors, which he consolidated through marriages into the royal

houses of Yemen, the Mundherites, and the Ghassanides. During the reignof al-Harith, however, the swelling tribes under his rule began to move

northward; there are reports that he led raids on Palestine and also that he

briefly displaced the Mundherites in al-Hira, probably at the instigation

of the Persians.96 Having overthrown the powerful Mundherites, the Kinda

not only expanded territorially beyond its stronghold in Najd but also

captured the prestige of indirect influence that the northern dynasties

had exercised over their nomadic peripheries. After his victory over the

Mundherites, delegation after delegation of nomadic tribes came volun-tarily to al-Hira to congratulate al-Harith on his extended authority and

to offer him further jurisdiction as their “king.”97




That wide expansion, probably an unintended consequence of imperial

manipulation and desire to take advantage of nomadic rivalries, became

implicated in models of non-nomadic governance. Gunnar Olinder’s ob-

servation that the kingdom did not consist of the tribe as much as of a

coalition of tribes headed by a family from Kinda is significant in this re-

spect, especially since that family had ongoing relations not only with the

tribes but also with Himyar, al-Hira before the takeover, the Ghassanids,

and Byzantium.98 Here, the idea of a family rather than a tribe as a unit of

rule clearly parallels and is perhaps borrowed from neighboring seden-

tary states. Thus, it may be argued that a model of governance exterior to

nomadism itself had gestated at the heart of the experiment from the

onset without being recognized as such by the subjugated tribes, since themodel’s impact was not fully known until the expansion of its authority,

both transtribally and territorially.

Tribes were thus divided into the resemblance of “provinces,” with au-

thority over them being allocated among the four sons of al-Harith.99

Other statelike transformations were introduced, such as establishing a

standing armed force, imposing order by hierarchical and authoritarian

means, and regulating state income through the collection of the etewah.

However, the whole system was based on a short-lived geographic and

demographic expansion. The rule of Kinda over al-Hira was based for the

most part on the consent of the Persians. As soon as government changed

hands in Persia, circa a.d. 531, and for reasons having to do with internal

Persian policies, the Mundherites were reinstated in al-Hira, and they

retaliated for their earlier loss by executing al-Harith and a number of the

most important leaders of the Kinda.

Thus collapsed the basis upon which the monarchical experiment de-pended. The rule over al-Hira did not last long enough to conclude the

building of all the functional, economic, and spiritual bases of the king-

dom within nomadic society.100 The fact that the source of this gover-

nance and its expansion was to an important extent not deeply rooted

in nomadic dynamics proper is illustrated in the dearth of information

regarding the dynamics by which the Kinda attained hegemony within

nomadism, especially compared to the well-known reports regarding its

assignment of kingship by rulers in Yemen or Persia.In this light, therefore, the end of the rule in al-Hira signaled the begin-

ning of the end of the royal experiment altogether. Despite the fact that




the commonality of the Kinda followed Hijr, al-Harith’s eldest son, after

the death of his father, the nomadic preference for less-abstract gover-

nance was evident in the fact that the loyalty to the earlier division of

tribes among the four sons prevailed over loyalty to a single central au-

thority, which had lost much of its foundations. Hijr himself was killed

shortly afterward during his unsuccessful attempt at forcing the rebellious

Asadians to pay the etewah. Reports of that episode are particularly illus-

trative; they record that after his original triumph Hijr extended a pardon

to the rebels, who then proceeded in a march of submission to his head-

quarters but had a change of heart along the way and assassinated him

upon their arrival.101 This story itself shows the precariousness of the

grounds of legitimacy for such a distant, transtribal order, which is likely to be challenged at the slightest hint of weakness and even, as in this case,

when it still commands significant reserve strength.

The large tribal confederations resumed their wars,dragging with them

their nominal rulers from what had remained of the heritage of Kinda.102

The great poet Imru’ l-Qays, who was the youngest son of the assassinated

king, failed to convince any of the tribes that had submitted to his father to

help him reestablish the withering kingdom. His trials and tribulations in

that regard are also very illustrative of the nomadic interpretation of the

affair—an interpretation clearly distinct from that of the royal family. The

reports indicate that Imru’ l-Qays’s appeal did initially generate some

response from his father’s staunch allies. The alliance led by the poet

fought and defeated the Asad. However, as soon as the partial victory over

branches related to Hijr’s assassins was accomplished, the Imru’ l-Qays’s

alliance disbanded because, according to his allies, he had fulfilled his basic

revenge duty (asab al-tha’r ), and the account was settled.103

This report indicates that the recovery of the kingdom meant little to

most nomads, including the royal family’s reliable allies. By contrast, the

claimant’s discourse was centered on the recovery of the kingship as an

obligation,104 rather than on simple restoration of justice through basic re-

venge. Within nomadic ideology, revenge is not understood as recovery of

loss or restoration of past. It simply balances a natural order that has tem-

porarily been violated, whereafter wandering can go on untroubled, as it

had since time immemorial. The fact that a kingdom over nomadism hadcollapsed meant little, since such a disappearance was not fundamentally

different from the manner in which all human effort in life is ultimately




devoured by the horizon of death and departure, as the mu‘allaqa ritually

registers at its beginning.

In this sense, the emergence of a discursive difference regarding the

idea of restoration of order—political in this case—becomes apparent.

For the claimant, the consequence of his nomadic allies’ refusal to support

his mission as far as monarchical restoration meant that he had to seek

support for his restorative obligation outside of nomadism. Imru’ l-Qays

died on his way to (or from) Byzantium in a fruitless attempt to enlist im-

perial help, after Arabs, including all of his brothers, had abandoned the

task (but not the balancing obligation of tha’r as traditionally understood).

This episode itself illustrates the rootedness of the discourse of Kinda’s

governance, especially after al-Harith, in sedentary and imperial modelsrather than nomadic ones. The nomadic model accepted the rule, as we

have seen here, for as long as the two discourses did not come into appar-

ent conflict.

Thus the monarchical experiment completely disintegrated, leaving

behind a state of utter anarchy in the nomadic areas, which were not to

be put under control until Islam reproduced a centralizing order less

than a century thereafter. Islam itself, it must be noted, was not invulner-

able to nomadic resistance to non-nomadic models of governance, even

though the initial Islamic model of governance was less rooted than

Kinda’s in those of neighboring states and empires. But it was not rooted

in nomadism either, introducing instead an original notion of a spiritu-

ally based transtribal order of rights and duties, much of whose origins

came from sedentary and semisedentary dynamics and rules of exchange.

Thus, immediately after the death of Muhammad, the nascent Islamic

political order itself had to fight a nomadic rebellion (hurub ar-riddah)very comparable to the one that had eradicated Kinda’s kingdom. But by

then, it had not only the resources to crush the rebellion but also a venue

of conquests ( futuhat ) that released the pent-up pressures away from the

peninsula.




rendering the experience

Eternal subsistence nomadism and the similitude of past and present

seemed to the Bedouin to be normative destiny. Austere as it was, Bedouin

life seemed inescapable. Western and northern Arabia offered only a few

alternatives, mostly around small-scale agriculture and trade, which in

turn could only be practiced by a small number of sedentaries. One of the

major features of nomadic ideology, therefore, entailed denigrating an

unattainable hadarah (sedentary) lifestyle while at the same time morally

exalting the timeless ethics of the badawah (nomadic) lifestyle. Further-

more, unlike the more integrated features of sedentary economy, where

one activity (trade or agriculture) predominated and gave way to an under-

standing of the world in terms of totalities, the three activities of which

the Bedouin economy consisted (pastoralism, hunting, ghazw [acquisition

raiding]),1 were structurally disjointed. Such a state of affairs gave way, as

we shall see, to a strolling articulation of the world whereby little empha-

sis was placed on systematic totalities.2

The nomadic consciousness is an essential part of the story because of,

on the one hand, its distinctive permanence and seeming extremity and,

53

three

Social Time, Death, and the Ideal



on the other, the imprints that it had left on Meccan consciousness and, to

be sure, on all sedentary frames of thinking. Such frames often explicitly

regarded nomadism as a point of genesis, while entertaining a lukewarm

or even hostile attitude toward its morality. This paradox left the sedenta-

rizing nomads with the imposing task of representing the world anew,

without recourse to the immortal certitudes of wandering upon land and

in thought. As Mecca expanded and generated wealth, it emerged as the

most pronounced contrast in the land to a Bedouin society that contin-

ued to be both economically stagnant and indifferent to the outside world.

Mecca’s trade economy increasingly made apparent the crucial role its re-

lations with distant and foreign states and societies played in its survival,

so much so that the neighboring Bedouin Arabs could only be discerned,through the city’s peripheral vision, as a source of unease. The cosmopoli-

tan vision of Mecca was in this sense predicated on a self-interest that

required that the nomads be distanced in all respects, including genealog-

ically. The dilemma consisted of an ensuing search for a “collective iden-

tity” on bases that deemphasized genealogical associations that would in-

variably lead the trading community back into nomadism. This crisis is

evident enough in the very background that allowed the development of

Islamic notions of universality—particularly in the notion of the umma

(transtribal community of the faithful), in Muhammad’s ability to aban-

don Mecca itself as his home, and in the enshrinement of the transtribal

constitution of Medina (to be discussed in Chapters 7 and 8).

What is of interest to us here, however, is the differential rendition of

the lived social world that can be traced back to such dislocation in

economies, associations, and discernible options. Some of the most inter-

esting figures in the literature of the period are those living in the gapsbetween sedentarism and nomadism, articulating experiences and tradi-

tions from the vantage point of their respective positions. An important

literary figure in this context is an-Nabigha adh Dhubyani, as he stands

near the edge of the desert, in perpetual preparation for departure toward

greener pastures. Of the great pre-Islamic poets, an-Nabigha was certainly

the most touched by sedentarism and thus obviously the least nomadic.

The biographic fragments present him as a protégé of the northern

Arabian dynasties (Ghassanides and Mundherites both, but especially theformer) and as a regular in royal courts, enjoying a clear distance from

Bedouin life. Yet he could still engage the poets of the period—both no-

54 • Social Time, Death, and the Ideal



mads and sedentaries—in his peculiar capacity as a critic of poetry.3 The

tradition records him as one of the most eminent judges of poetry in the

festival of ‘Ukaz.

Characteristically, an-Nabigha adheres to some of the important for-

mulas of nomadic literary articulation. In his famous ode, he pays tribute

to the tradition through a rather eloquent portrayal of the past functions

of the remaining traces of habitation. The crucial difference between the

way an-Nabigha opens his ode and the traditional way of opening odes

observed by the other nomadic poets, however, consists in what he notices

in the traces. This semisedentary poet pays the closest attention precisely

to those material elements that had made it possible to live in the de-

scribed location. Thus, neither abstract memories of love nor loved onesappear, save as a name in the opening couplet. This discourse opts to dis-

pense with the traditional thematic not by extended mourning but by a

swift resolve in favor of departing: “So get away from this eyesore” (c. 7).

The speech preceding the departure serves to confirm the emptiness of

the site, the dissolution of all life on it, a realization that then functions as

a rationale for the resolution to follow.

The stage of the judge in the history of poetry seems to entail or pre-

suppose, as evident here, a particular attention to systemic value. That is,

the opening is not a mere tribute to tradition, to be then dispensed with

rather abruptly; rather, it is a basis for what follows, a link, a justification

(“so”), a rationale for constructing a conclusive sequence. This organic

unity epitomizes discursive unification through an invocation of total and

systemic values. The discursive movement between an observation, a con-

textual description, a unifying conclusion, and a statement of direction for

the movement beyond posits each as a constitutive element of a granderand continuous elaboration. The entire sequence is itself posited as a con-

clusion that opens up another sequence.

The closest approximation of such a sequential and total structure in

the other pre-Islamic odes can be discerned in the ode of Labid, who

lived long enough to witness the trials and tribulations of Islam and who

was influenced by an-Nabigha. After the traditional, agonized opening,

Labid’s movement away from the ruins commences not with devaluing

them but with accepting their normative silence:“Yet how should one ques-tion rocks / so immovable, whose speech is nothing [intelligible]?” (c. 10).

Here is the judgment on the ultimate unresponsiveness of that which had

Social Time, Death, and the Ideal • 55



instigated the halting, whereby the discussion is reoriented toward that

which is on the move, that which is of a known, experienced quality and

that, by extension, can be interrogated. But here, one finds not so much a

“conclusive” discourse as a traditional form of discontinuity, albeit intro-

duced by a judgment negating the value of further reminiscence. Life

emerges thereafter in the form of a caravan carrying loved ones and de-

parting into the Beyond of the horizon. The poetics follow them until

they disappear in the distance. Then, autonomous enclaves of reflection

take the place of observing, recording, and concluding.

Such movement is symptomatic, generally speaking, of the legendary

odes of pre-Islamic culture. They consist of an abundance of disjointed

themes with little in the way of logical connections or transitional points.With few exceptions, which can be traced back to sedentary frames of

influence—as can be seen in some moments in an-Nabigha—the odes

seem to contain little sequential or causal order. The seminal poem of

Imru’ l-Qays, for instance, follows this route: reminiscences at the ruins

(nine couplets), three lustful adventures with women (twenty-one cou-

plets), description of the ideally beautiful woman and her effect on the

self (thirteen couplets), night (five couplets), ethics (one couplet), an en-

counter with a wolf in a valley (three couplets), description of his horse

(eighteen couplets), and description of the rain and other natural phe-

nomena (twelve couplets). Although it may be argued that the first three

of these eight topics are somehow related, the transition from one to the

next is made abruptly, catching a modern reader by complete surprise.

However, this poem shares with all other great odes an essential similari-

ty: the existential theme of the opening. Standing at the ruins, seeing

through them endearing images from the past, explaining their impact toeither mythical companions or to the ruins themselves. The initial tone is

powerful, sad, and hopeless. A sense of loneliness underlines the begin-

ning of the story—if it is a story—that the ode tells. Such a psychological

self-torture (or what seems to be self-torture by way of remembrance)

persists until interrupted by images of hedonism, survival, and adventure.

The first two visions in the ode seem to be set in opposition to each other.

Nine of the ten lengthy poems of antiquity have similar openings,4 and

all of them resemble that of Imru’ l-Qays in dealing disjointedly withseveral topics and moving erratically from one to another. The odes do

possess individual specific emphases and thematics, but they all share the




tradition of the opening and abrupt departures. The profundity of lonely

gloom is not the only ambiance permitted in the tradition of halting and

discursively rendering experience in the world.5 Such an opening is fre-

quently followed by passages that, in their gay and confident manner,

completely contradict the lugubrious spirit preceding them. The dichoto-

my of the exact opposites is not far removed from the way that changed

life fortunes and rapid adjustments construe the essence of the badawah

lifestyle, the source of much of that tradition. In the same fashion, the dis-

junction between the components of the Bedouin economy seem to par-

allel a mode of expression that is oblivious to sedentary systematization

and to the construction of logic according to organic and necessary links.

It is in this light that an-Nabigha’s simultaneous tribute to and nega-tion of this tradition is significant. Being a prominent sycophant at the

courts of the northern Arabian dynasties, he attests not only to a tradition

at a high stage of refinement and meticulation but also to the genesis of

sedentary political deployment of the poetic discourse. The poet here ad-

dresses no mythical companions such as those who had halted with Imru’

l-Qays. Rather, he halts to initiate a dialogue with the traces (c. 2) and to

eventually announce the end of halting for no reason other than the prac-

tical impossibility of past reclamation: “So get away from this eyesore,

there is no return for it.” There is, finally, a judgment on the ruins. The

judgment does not merely assess the ruins or reconfirm the futility of all

this halting; in addition it explicitly advises others to abandon this loca-

tion and to go on their own way. The contrast between the past and the

present state of the ruins is the crux upon which this knowledge unfolds.

The genesis of this remarkable discovery of the futility of the effort to

reclaim the past can be found in other odes, notably Labid’s. What Labiddescribes of the ruined abode does not transcend its present physical ap-

pearance, which is contrasted to what it might have looked like in the

past. In other words, what the site invokes in memory is its visible con-

creteness. No abstract memory arises here. There is no remembrance

other than that motivated by a discernible trace, which then reminds the

poet only of a past state of completeness but not of any events, love ad-

ventures, duels, fables, or the like. At the “stage” of near sedentarism, the

discursive tradition becomes barely capable of carrying along other thanan absolute immediacy. In this sense, sedentarism entails a decreased dis-

tance between poetics and their physical object, between rendition and




experience. Such a decreased distance entails not necessarily a diminution

of “profundity” or “imagination” but, rather, the reorientation of thought

away from the ethical cosmos of normative and perpetual loss and into a

task. This task is then expressed in the transformation of expressive dis-

course into the depository of, and means for, an effort to render experi-

ence as a piecemeal reclamation of the estranged world. In highly idealistic

language, Hegel describes this notion of experience as a journey from the

abstract into its nonalienated containment: “Experience is the name we

give to just this movement in which the immediate, the unexperienced,

i.e., the abstract, whether of sensible being or of a bare, simple thought,

becomes estranged and then returns to itself from estrangement, and is

only then presented in its actuality and truth and becomes the property of consciousness.”6

The abstract, for Hegel, is the unthought near, the unproblematized

presence, rather than a hidden essence retrievable by thought alone. Ex-

perience here is practical questioning, which is oriented toward evaluat-

ing objects, endowing them with specific identities, and instilling in the

place of their polyphonous presence a stable meaning, which alone allows

one to claim to have experienced them so that one can proceed beyond.

This form of experience was not the property of the nomadic ode

proper, as is most apparent in its normative lack of conclusivity at each

juncture, in its fatalism and infusion with the sounds and movements

within autonomous nature. But what the ode provided was a form in

which further “experiences” could be deposited. The form worked in this

fashion precisely because it was not uniquely nomadic. It was only

uniquely formulaic, with signposts, such as the common opening theme,

establishing it as a reservoir of past -oriented interrogation. It was, further-more, uniquely preservable—as an oral tradition—and hence an appro-

priate vehicle for rendering that which must not be allowed to disappear

from memory. And it was audience-oriented and thus a fundamentally

social form of communicating experience. Here, the form becomes the

foundation of a tradition precisely because it provides a reproducible

sense of overcoming otherness and estrangement, whether in nature or

with regard to past events.

But such a tradition also lends itself over time to purely formulaic ap-propriations, especially as it becomes disseminated and therefore acces-

sible. General accessibility opened the tradition to the games of power. In




the case of the poetic tradition proper, two sources of power play can be

recognized: first, pure tribal politics, and second, the development of a

definite status for the poet and for a social institution of poetry. It is per-

haps this susceptibility to power that influenced the unique Qur’anic

form, which was apparently advised by the trials and tribulations of earlier

claimants to sagehood, and even prophethood, among poets.

With the advent of schemes of empowerment through poetics, the ren-

dition of experience itself succumbed to more overarching social goals.

The poetic rush from all directions to what became a formulaic site

opened up by the earlier, lonely poets then carried a variety of packages

along. And yet the crowding of words, statements, power, and institution-

alizations crossed with the poets, unawares, over the site into the otherside of the distance, into the depths of the other horizon, where nothing

of the originary experience could be detected any longer and where there

was nothing, not even traces of authentic ruins, to invigorate the fading

spirits. At that other end of the horizon, the tradition—as a form for de-

positing experience—languished until it eroded or simply folded upon it-

self and reverted to the nothingness from whence it came.7

idealization and the past

The nomadic formula for addressing experience, which continued to reg-

ister it in an encyclopedic but inconclusive fashion, remained oblivious to

such metamorphoses of the tradition. As mentioned before, the Bedouin

socioeconomy entailed seemingly timeless truth and stability—in spite of

the demographic pressures—and was largely excluded from trade-based

sedentarism. The obvious untenability of any other style of life evidently led to the Bedouins’ moral condemnation of that which was not likely

ever to be within their grasp. In the process, they ennobled their misery

beyond measure. The emphasis on the moral aspect was particularly suita-

ble, since it freed the Bedouins from having to view the sedentaries from

angles that showed the nomads clearly at a disadvantage. Here, nomadic

consciousness became explicitly antimaterialist, as it expressed its disin-

terest in the supposed lure of sedentary life. Al-Mas‘udi offers a succinct

rendition of an account of the origins of the badawah lifestyle:“The Arabsregarded wandering in the land and selectively inhabiting the various lo-

cations over the days as bearing more [attributes of] glory, and [hence] as




being more worthy of noble spirits . . . and they said: ‘Let us not be con-

fined by any territory, [let us] live wherever we wish. . . . So they chose the

life of the Bedouins.”8

What is significant in this passage is that the reference to freedom from

territorial confinement stands as a sole and self-evident indicator of honor,

in no need of further elaboration as to why it should be regarded as such.

The self-evidence of what is honorable is a common motif in nomadic

narratives, which are occasionally expanded in response to a sedentary

insistence on “furnishing evidence.” In such case, justifications are never

in short supply:

Others mentioned that the ancient Arabs began to contemplate settling

and the value of [permanent] abodes as a result of the conditions to

which Allah had subjected them: high dangers, nobility of resolve and

fate, a superior sense of glory, and [a propensity to] avoid disgrace.

They considered the situations of the cities and buildings, but they

found them [to entail] shame and shortcomings. The knowledgeable

and perceptive among them said: “Lands ail and suffer as bodies do.

The proper course is to selectively choose locations according to their

suitability: If air is strong [for instance], it may harm the bodies of theinhabitants and affect their moods.” And the opinionated among them

said: “Buildings and being surrounded limit [the ability] to use the

land, hinder wandering, imprison the energies, and inhibit the instinc-

tive quest after honor. There is no good in submitting to a predicament

like that.” They also claimed that buildings and ruins limit nutrition

and prevent the [circulation] of the air, the passage of its currents, and

the smoothness of its flow. Therefore they inhabited the open land inwhich they feared not confinement, settlement, and harm, [but where

they enjoyed] the dispersion of matter, the friendliness of the air, and the

absence of disease.As [living] in such quarters tames behavior and crys-

tallizes the [instinct of] wandering between the homes, minds and feel-

ings sharpen as the air does, air whose nature involves space. In [such

conditions] one attains immunity from handicaps, diseases, illnesses,

and pains. Thus the Arabs preferred to wander in the deserts and rest in

the desert. So they are the most resolute of people, the most patient, the

healthiest, the most protective of their neighbors, the most attentive to

injuries to their honor, the most generous, and the most clear-minded.




They were endowed [with such qualities] because of the purity of the

space and the cloudlessness of the atmosphere. Bodies contain in their

parts the filterings of pollutants and refuse . . . and therefore motes,

illness, and handicaps proliferated among the inhabitants of cities, in-

vaded their bodies, and multiplied [visibly] in them. Therefore the Arabs

were luckier than other, various people, for what we have mentioned of

their choice of places and [preference for] wandering in the land.9

This passage contains an outstanding summary of a peculiar process of

logical reasoning and justification. By deliberately selecting and empha-

sizing noneconomic criteria, such as health and moralism, the nomads

chose an ideological terrain that was uniquely theirs. The visible pros-

perity of trade-based towns made it increasingly difficult for the badawah

lifestyle to appear relatively superior on the basis of economic arguments.

Yet although this passage does not refer to economy, transactions, or ma-

terial wealth, it does address a more fundamental idea, namely, compara-

tive well-being. According to the passage, the nomads possess a moral and

physical well-being that is superior to that of the hadaris, even though the

latter may seem to enjoy more material wealth. The passage combines two

lines of argumentation to demonstrate the nomads’ superiority: Oneshows the favorable consequence of choosing to live a nomadic life, while

the other criticizes alternative lifestyles on the basis of the criteria set

forth for the “ideal” life.

An idealized prescription for life would require a rearrangement of the

time thought to contain such a life. Here, life “as lived” (daily and acciden-

tal) and life “as articulated” (sequential and total) appear to be the same.

The idealized concept of life appears to be an irreducible totality, whence

events are understood as chapters of an encompassing and meaningful

story of life rather than as random occurrences upon the open surface of

pure existence. In this context, events emanate from a large reservoir of

known possibilities and are comprehensible precisely because it is always

a particular life that lives an event, makes it possible, and ultimately grasps

it as a document to be added, through the work of memory, to the total

archive of a life that is discernible to the extent that it demonstrates an

already known truth.The stable order of social knowledge was most clearly evident in the

primacy allocated to blood relationships, which fulfilled an ontological




demand and gave a sense of predetermined order and meaning for in-

dividual existence in a widely dispersed society. The fact that a binding

ethical foundation for social solidarity must come involuntarily and from

without is evidenced in the supremacy that lineage had over conscious

and subjective arrangements, like marriage, and that was especially evi-

dent when the two came into conflict. The story of the Basus war illus-

trates this principle very clearly: Incited by the murder of a Taghlib chief

by a Bakrian, Taghlib prepared for war by first expelling from among its

ranks the sister of the assassin, even though she also happened to be the

widow of the murdered chief. Here, primary bonds are those objectively

established by an unchosen birth and thus by an exterior nature; they

supersede bonds subjectively established later in life, bonds that remainless certain, less inevitable, and therefore more easily breakable. There is a

clear expression here of a belief in the relative profanity of all subjective

rearrangement of the norms of nature, norms from which the idea of a

possibly different future is absent. This view is based in the feeling that

unchosen frames of social existence possess a claim to timeless and supe-

rior stability that surpasses the claims to stability of frames of existence

chosen during an individual lifespan.

In a society prefigured by such an orientation, the idealization of life

would be expected not to offer a guide for venturing toward the unknown

but to arrange and interpret events in such a way as to avert the potential

perils of nihilism and purposelessness, which are seen to lurk in purely

subjective and unanchored programs. But under conditions of subsis-

tence, survival itself is one of the prime purposes. Continued survival, by

itself, is at the same time a story of continued success in attaining the pur-

pose of life. In an above-subsistence economy, such as that of the hadaris,the purpose is no longer to aim at simple survival but to idealize an addi-

tional layer of life, a life larger than itself, that is, a life larger than pure ex-

istence. The question that follows, then, concerns the spheres of value

from which the logics of idealization are drawn. The route toward such

values can at least partially be charted by a brief look at the idealization

trajectory evident in pre-Islamic poetry.10

As far as idealization is concerned, the openings of the pre-Islamic

odes possessed a common feature: They remember, mourn, glorify, andre-create the past. Here, it is profoundly significant that one always begins

with the past and not with the future, the present, or some other sphere




outside the realm of time. A reference to the future, to be sure, does occur

in a few scattered fragments in ancient poetry, but only in the form of

pedagogic wisdom and then only in tones overshadowed by a sense of

pessimism. In the unchanging Bedouin society, no grand social shifts are

expected, and the material and spiritual frameworks created by millennia

of sameness assume eternal legitimacy. The future is not in itself interest-

ing because nothing other than what is already known is expected to

occur in it. The lived life of the present consists of incessant wandering

and fighting for survival. It is interesting in this context that the present—

the moment of producing the poem—is hardly mentioned. With the

exception of a few tentative hedonistic interjections, the legendary odes

frequently express an unshrouded sense of estrangement from particularconditions of the present. The past thus becomes the undisputed tempo-

ral arena for the process of idealization.11 The past is usually more event-

ful or glorious, both for the individual as well as for the tribe.12

Idealizing the past could therefore be understood as an expression of

its loss, as well as a verdict on the inability of the present to retrieve or re-

place what was lost. For such a vision, no scene better combines the ideal-

ized past with an awareness of its unattainability in the present than that

of ruins of a deserted place made meaningful by the idea that loved ones

had inhabited them some time before. In addition, such a scene provides

the overall vision with a sense of realism; after all, deserted places are

themselves the direct product of the continuous wandering “chosen” as

the proper meaning of life by the Bedouins, who in turn regard such wan-

dering as the defining feature of their lifestyle.

This uniform commencement with a salute to the past (physically evi-

denced by its ruins), ends abruptly and is not revisited for the remainderof the poem.13 But it does evidently furnish the poet with a better position

from which to articulate a more far-fetched idealization of life. What fol-

lows the opening is invariably less gloomy, at times rather joyful, and it oc-

cupies the bulk of the poetic production. It is as though the difficult agony

involved in confronting the question of life as a continuous totality ideal-

ized in a hopelessly distanced past gives rise to a defiant affirmation of ex-

actly what the idealization process had relegated to the spatiotemporal

realm of the ruins.To idealize in this fashion is not open to everyone. To idealize is a right

that must be acquired through a dutiful confrontation of the ethical




question of life’s totality. Such a progression enhances the poem as a cred-

ible representation of the course of learning in life, beginning with realiz-

ing one’s embeddedness in the past through the inscription of genealogy

and ending in the abrupt and unglamorous consumption by death. The

construction of a credible opening here legitimates and accentuates re-

ceptiveness to what follows it, which is then no longer an unanchored

individualistic creation.

The traditional sense of loss that permeates the opening of the poems

and the hedonistic response that follows it are often assumed to represent

opposing sets of images. But in this case, one can discern little of the con-

sequential ramifications of the old logic of thesis and antithesis. Rather,

the two contradictory ends are left standing without an apparent resolu-tion, whereafter the thoughts of the poet travel irregularly from one topic

to another with little apparent effort to connect such themes to the open-

ing dichotomy or even to each other.

The hedonistic response (if it is a response) to the sad beginning has

been conceived of, thus far, in a variety of ways: as an antithesis in the

original dichotomy, as a negation of the present, as a way of relieving

the original gloomy picture, and as a specific way of enabling a better

rendition of life’s present course, made possible after having dutifully

confronted the ethical question of life as a totality. But the main idea

concerns the negation (not necessarily the rejection) of current predica-

ments of lived life. Here, negation entails parceling out and highlighting

one aspect of life, an aspect that is introduced as the most valuable en-

dowment or entitlement at a time when the social organization makes it

least accessible. In the case of Imru’ l-Qays, for instance, unrestricted love

affairs become a locus toward which all ideas of individual well-beinggravitate.

Thus, both the traditional opening and the withdrawal from it repre-

sent two forms of the same logic of negation, rather than a thesis/antithesis

dichotomy. Both are involved in reconstructing lived life and in relegat-

ing the ideal version of life to the only temporal dimension that could ac-

commodate it under nomadism, namely, the past. The “antithesis” is in ef-

fect a continuation of an earlier attempt at idealizing the concept of life’s

totality. The “antithesis” is the thesis itself continued into the present.There are no contradictory ideas or intentions but, rather, an attention to

a diachronic arrangement of a concept of life that is to be totalized. And




along the continuum of the temporal dimension, each moment requires a

readjustment of the mood of telling.

In sum, the necessity for a “process of idealization” comes from the

need to account for the totality of life under conditions where the idea of

the future holds little novelty, meaning, or relevance. The idealized vision,

therefore, is ordinarily woven from the sphere of images constituting the

“already known,” that is, that which must be posited as a past along the

temporal dimension. In this case, “past” means an empirically verifiable

yet still instructive loss: The life constituting it has perished or wandered

away yet left behind a testimony, a trace, a memory, or a lesson in the form

of interrogable ruins.

The idealization attempt proceeds, then, toward the present, being car-ried along by an altered mood. The legendary nature of the original ideal

expresses an ideal togetherness that, having been broken, challenges the

unbreakability of nomadic genealogies and alliances. The idea of totality

here is fundamental to this poetic enterprise in a uniquely nomadic fash-

ion. Here, idealization must remain incomplete, and consciously so, as the

proclamation of loss standing at the opening of the poem makes clear.

This is a story motivated by a sense of loss, which has already been recov-

ered in the possibility of telling itself. Since time exists, only the articula-

tion of the diachronic totality of life is possible, not the lived life itself as

such. Therefore, when a poetic rendition of life tells of life’s totality, it can

only tell of its loss. But in the final analysis, the existence of time allows no

other recourse.

This tradition contrasts sharply with post-Islamic poetry, which was

more oriented toward topical precision and was consequently shorter. In

addition to the concern with the question of life’s totality, the encyclope-dic nature of the mu‘allaqat (odes) signifies an early attempt at unifying

all natural and social phenomena in a single body of commentaries, a task

that was to be fulfilled by the Islamic cosmology and ethical laws shortly

afterward. The receptiveness to a novel and comprehensive system of so-

cial order and natural explanations, such as provided by Islam, depends to

a decisive extent on its ability to thematically and politically organize a

discursive form for a movement that had already been articulating some

concern for the idea of totality. Without advocating evolutionary deter-minism, one can still argue that the encyclopedic nature of the mu‘allaqat

represented an embryonic attempt at regulating the significant knowns




under the edicts of a singular body of thought (that is, a body of thought

to which the notion of singularity of form was essential). The distinctive-

ness of such a body consisted of its claim to aesthetic form, which set it

apart from ordinary speech.14 (Testifying to such an effect, the Qur’an

itself had to compete on the literary plane with the mu‘allaqat and came

eventually to see in the poets both a threat and a potential for alliance.)

This unification of totality through the form of articulation as expressed

in the mu‘allaqat does not in itself furnish socially acceptable truths or

ideals. Rather, by establishing a model and an experience of totalization, it

sets the tone for a certain range of experiments that are formulated with

respect to the model and the experience. As we shall see at a later stage, the

land was teeming with such experiments, of which Islam was but one.

mortality and the future

Sedentary time is conceived of in terms of measurement. Sedentary dis-

course subordinates such conceptual frameworks in time’s flow as period,

teleology, causality, progression, and so on to either elaborate isochro-

nisms or to other abstract structures, which are nonetheless anchored in

a vision of time as a fearsome, exterior element of nature with which a

hopeless duel must be waged (for example, the regular passage of years,

age, and the temporal limits of expectations and projects). Either way,

sedentary time is external to human life, directing life’s course as it drags

life along the temporal dimension. Both sedentaries and nomads saw time

as a phenomenon outside of life’s essential embodiment, yet they regis-

tered different conclusions: Whereas the nomad moved toward an im-

pending mortality, the sedentary moved simply toward another point intime, a point infused with judgments about, conclusions from, and ac-

countability for its prehistory.

The mu’allaqat, in general, reveal a fundamentally nomadic account of

time. Yet the act of recording such poetics sought to save them from no-

madic obliviousness to their potential perishability. Recording, therefore,

overturned the nomadic conception of time, revealing a fundamental re-

orientation regarding its status. But such recording did not merely occa-

sion the discovery of temporality according to sedentary frameworks of causal progression, salvage, and accountability for moments and authors

of such moments. Here, moments or instances themselves revealed an




efformable, isolable character. At the point of such an assemblage of a

record of totality as attempted in the mu‘allaqat, it was as though the

gaseous flow of life in that endless expanse of the desert was corrupted.

The first speech to come down to us from that wilderness belongs to that

crucial moment of reorienting perspective regarding time.

Although the activity of recording is evidently related to an interest in

preservation and an awareness of the temporal nature of value and its

perishability, in pre-Islamic culture there was no universal account of the

eventuality of human death itself. The more common attitude, traceable

to the badawah lifestyle, showed a profound lack of concern for a world

beyond. There are reports that mention a melange of beliefs on the sub-

ject, including belief in various forms of resurrection.15

But it is alsoevident that even when a belief in some form of afterlife existed, it never

occupied a central role in the spirituality of pre-Islamic culture.16 Indeed,

some of the most persuasive arguments used against Muhammad focused

on his assertion of the eventuality of resurrection and judgment.17 In an

interesting episode, some Qurayshans made their belief in Islam contin-

gent upon Muhammad’s successful appeal to Allah to bring forth two

(equally impossible) miracles, namely, changing the nature of the land

and resurrecting their forefathers:

Oh Muhammad! . . . you know that no people have more confined land,

less water, or a harder life than we do. So ask your Allah, who sent you

to preach, to move away those mountains that had bounded us, and let

Him flatten our land and [create] in it rivers like those of Syria and

Iraq. And [also] let him resurrect our deceased forefathers, and let

among them be Qusay Ibn Kilab, who was a trustworthy man, so that

we may ask them about [the truth of] what you are saying.18

Though this statement includes a clear tone of mockery, emanating from

the conviction that it is impossible to fulfill the request, it also invokes a

structure of judgment and credibility oriented toward the past, with the

deceased forefathers having to vouch for any novelty such as Muhammad

was proclaiming. Here, resurrection is impossible because the agency that

terminates existence is a noninterrogable dahr —one of the more epochal

names for time as a total, self-enclosed natural phenomenon (and not as aprogression of discrete moments or as a process open to manipulation by

any agency).




In Mecca, the worldly view surrounding the commercial lifestyle con-

tinued to foster in some way a materialist interpretation of life and to

relegate life’s finitude to an aspect of the vague idea of dahr. Such an atti-

tude never had to contradict any earlier nomadic ontology. The low im-

portance given to the interpretation of life and death in both Bedouin and

sedentary societies is analogous to the low degree of adherence to the va-

riety of religions that existed before Islam, which are to be discussed in

Chapter 4. Communal ownership, interchangeability of socioeconomic

experiences, and lack of social stratification among individuals in no-

madic, agricultural, and early commercial communities motivated neither

a mystical interpretation of difference nor a deferral of the issue to a

world beyond lived life. The interpretation of the nature of life’s course,especially as seen in the context of its horizon, death, was not to be in-

formed by the model of stable socioeconomic differentiation, judgment,

and justice restoration until such thematics began to consistently perme-

ate an increasingly commerce-based, private wealth–oriented society.

This awareness of the ephemeral nature of all presences, and thus all

unities built thereupon, permeates the odes in an often explicit way, such

as in Tarafa, Zuhair, or al-A‘sha. In al-A‘sha’s ode, the theme of love is dis-

pensed with as soon as its protagonist, Hurayrah, begins to complain

about life’s uncertainties, using her occasional barefootedness as the

metaphor. The poet then immediately contrasts that scene to his experi-

ence at a tavern, in which his drinking companions are described as being

fundamentally unconcerned regarding the matter. They are aware that all

shall perish, the barefooted as well as the shod. This theme is paralleled

in Tarafa’s ode, where death is entrusted with the power to erase all differ-

ences in life. In this case, the transition between the two comparablescenes is not totally arbitrary, as one clearly comments upon the other

from a vantage point different from that of the ruins. As the lover’s cara-

van gradually disappears into the distance, the poet finds a tavern, toward

which he opts to wander instead of continuing to ponder his loss. The

governing spirit of indulgence in the establishment is defined by an aware-

ness of the absurdity of the lover’s concerns for difference or even relative

well-being, superfluous as they seem in the face of the consuming and

comprehensive death to come.According to this logic, therefore, there can hardly be a difference be-

tween lived, actual life and its potential goal. Such a difference, more ap-




parent in sedentary societies down to the present, is often expressed in the

broad term “alienation,” which advises a programmed social action or a

code of duties in life, activities directed toward a goal that is to be reached

before death. To do otherwise, that is, to structure one’s life more cau-

tiously so as to programmatically maneuver through the cracks in the

walls of difference (between life and its goal), presupposes an order of sta-

bility in the socioeconomy of life itself: a long-term settlement or a life

programmed by the utopic requirement of eventual immobility, a teleolo-

gizable life, tormented by a drive to overcome the difference between the

lived and the goal within the timespan allotted for one to live.

This absence of difference under nomadism is “proved” by parading

death, which looms large in such instances (for example, al-A‘sha’s cou-plet 26, which is most pertinent here, but also Tarafa’s couplets 63–65).

For death, in effect, looms as the ultimate halt to the conditions of move-

ment and is their final horizon. In contrast, the path of the sedentary soci-

ety toward death is cluttered with structures, images, and plans for the

stability and permanence of the settlement’s structure. Sedentary halting

is the long pause before death, but it is also a discontinuation of wander-

ing by a means other than death. As such, the objective of such a pause is

to complete life’s goal before death takes away both life and its goal.

Halting, thus, is this middle region at which the discovery of the differ-

ence between life and its goal appears clothed in the mantle of alienation

from the present. Halting obstructs from view the phenomenon of roads

existing for their own sake, roads by whose side all differences between life

and its goal could be laid to rest and ignored as the journey continues into

the beyond. Under conditions of permanent halting, such differences must

be integrated into programs and mystiques of overcoming, or else they must be accounted for in a grand cosmological scene of stability.

The theme is intensely elaborated in Tarafa’s famous ode, where indi-

vidual wandering and the camel furnish the starkest thematic unities. The

interesting dimension of Tarafa’s case concerns—much like the case of

Imru’ l-Qays—a need to ponder the difference between lived life and

“goal” anew, in the light of having been expelled from the tribe for failure

to meet one’s obligations. Tarafa’s ode is full of oscillations between mo-

ments of the self and moments of apology for social detachment, as heknew no course other than a failed attempt to maintain normative be-

longing with a minimal sacrifice of the self. These “wild productions,” as




Sir William Jones once called the mu‘allaqat, could be seen, after all, as

moments of the self in history. Above all, they are “productions,” that is,

renditions of life, philosophy, and ideals ascribed to a producer. This par-

ticular producer, Tarafa, finds it imperative to tell of the manner in which

he was thrown out of the tribe:

Unceasingly I tippled the wine and took my joy,

unceasingly I sold and squandered my hoard and patrimony

till all my family deserted me, every one of them,

and I sat alone like a lonely camel scabby with mange. (c. 51–52)

The sequence following the above (c. 54–67) contains Tarafa’s eloquent

defense of decadence. Again, we see a common thread. The theme islaunched by negating immortality (more precisely, by questioning the

prerogatives of his detractor by disempowering the detractor over mor-

tality). Thus, the hedonistic project is couched in an awareness of an indi-

vidual finitude, regardless of the awareness that “society,” as a concept, as

Other, or as incubator of the eventual and detachable self, shall outlast the

death of the speaker. This fact instigates an individual attempt to forestall

death (c. 55: ubadiruha, “preempt it”) through a specific strategy:

But for three things, that are the joy of a young fellow,

I assure you I wouldn’t care when my deathbed visitors arrive—

first, to forestall my charming critics with a good swig of crimson wine

that foams when the water is mingled in;

second, to wheel at the call of the beleaguered a curved-shanked steed

streaking like the wolf of the thicket you’ve startled lapping the water;

and third, to curtail the day of showers, such an admirable season,

dallying with a ripe wench under the pole-propped tent. (c. 56–59)

Here, the importance of death is defined by the specific actions and

possibilities that it takes away from life. Those are, after all, the meanings

of an already lived—or already imagined—life. They are disentangled,

looked at afresh, reclassified within an order of priorities, encoded as pat-

terns of a system for the same life, and articulated in the context of ma-

terial and sensual—rather than metaphysical—experience.19 Those three

areas of action deliver life’s already experienced goal so completely thatdeath ceases to be a worry. Thus, a project aiming to forestall death by

structuring one’s own finitude—beyond the impasse of generalities—




begins by emptying mortality of its proclaimed finitude, by throwing in its

face an exhaustive list from the reality of the self’s own resourcefulness

(c. 55: bima malakat yadi, “with what I possess”). A vicious circle ensues:

The initiative to replace life’s finitude with a set of momentary pleasures re-

confirms that the certainty of finitude is obviated only when the meaning

of one’s life is condensed in a moment of the present. Finitude, therefore, as

opposed to a momentary life, is permanent. As such, this form of finitude

not only appears as empirical and actual death but also as the most norma-

tive and general doctrine of stability in the world of movement.

Tarafa’s “three things” are meant to be comprehensive. Life consists of

them; little else is worthy of inclusion. Not only does this self know what

life’s worth is, but he is also able to announce an individual decision tolive it according to this specific conception of worth. He wants that which

constitutes the temporal domain of desire to become permanent. That

is, he wants to “end” at this point, before death. That Tarafa needed to ar-

ticulate such an outline in itself presupposes an enigmatic moment, borne

out of social detachment and the need to interpret life anew in such a

light. While one thus finds elements of a structured “project,” it still occu-

pies the figural sphere of strict materialism, as the conception of life was

elsewhere in the badawah lifestyle. There was no elaborate afterlife, no

hell/paradise duality, no God to judge, no possibility of reward, and no

depleting power over human life other than that unceasing march of time,

to which the Arabs attached other names full of epochal, almost atempo-

ral overtones (for example, dahr, zaman), as though time were a subject

capable of acting and of doing harm, as though it were a concept residing

at a distance from the thinking mind and following its own course.

Yet poetry functioned also at a different, and somewhat contradictory,level. Though poetry frequently commented on perishing and loss as

recurrent norms, unalterable by human action, the very fact that poetry

alone was preserved in such a dismal landscape of void demonstrated the

possibility of preservation in the realm of language. Language thus began

to appear in and assume a particular social form, which became insepa-

rable from the genesis of an interest in the idea of “future,” here being

defined as a realm of yet-to-be-known possibilities. Future no longer

meant simply and necessarily death and the erasure of pointless differ-ence. By demonstrating preservability, the world seemed to offer itself for

a particular form of repackaging, which would allow it to be retrieved and




reorganized for a variety of projects oriented toward the future. Such an

experience of possibilities, as we will see, went through various metamor-

phoses and stages. Tarafa was one of the first observers of this issue, and

he lived long enough only to take note of it, being aware of chaos’s ability

to overcome subjective planning, the theme with which his ode comes to

an end:

The days shall disclose to you things you were ignorant of,

and he whom you never provisioned will bring you back tidings;

one that you purchased never a scrap for will come to you with news,

though you appointed no time for him to keep tryst. (c. 102–103)

According to this view, it is futile to structure things so as to make theworld predictable, or even knowable. Time shall reveal to you what you do

not know. If there were any worthwhile knowledge, Tarafa proclaims in an

unusual expression of generalized pedagogy (which one most often asso-

ciates with Zuhair), it would be revealed by itself, by time alone: It would

unfold itself naturally and effortlessly. This, at its most fundamental level,

is a restatement of the distrust of purposeful human effort in general.

Tarafa is suspicious of planning, more trusting of chance, of which he

knows himself to be a victim.

Time, thus, is both revelatory and destructive. It cannot yet be con-

trolled, as both revelation and destruction come from without, with little

contribution from those exposed to its unpredictable whims. But the fact

that the odes always begin by interrogating traces from the past that time

has allowed to remain just barely visible—as hints of time’s power—is it-

self significant. Here, there is not just a simple surrender but a recognition

that traces are an invitation to ponder the nature of the course of life inrelation to the lesson infused in the traces. In the patiently conceived ode

of Zuhair, in which he otherwise complains about time having left him to

live much longer than desired, the poet’s original interrogation of the

traces places them within a more normative cycle of natural and cyclical

movement:

There it was I stood after twenty livelong years [hijja ],

hard put to it to recognize the lodging, deeply as I meditated. (c. 4)

Zuhair, it must be kept in mind, had lived long enough to witness (c. 57)

the random prerogatives of fate and consequently to confine the realm of




the knowable to the past and the present (c. 59). Thus he confines his

action to a long wait for his coming finitude, and his wisdom to what

could be gleaned through distant remembrance. Twenty years had passed

since that experience that has now slipped out of the deep inventory of

memory to stand at the entrance to an ode. The intervening time had not

produced a better remembrance. One may say that such is a stagnant,

uneventful life. How, then, does one describe an uneventful life? Indeed,

what is an “event” in the context of such a life? How does memory trans-

form a nonevent into an event? How does discourse represent the event as

a particular sequence for pedagogic purposes?

The event in this case is the measure of time itself. Zuhair uses not the

abstract equivalents to the term “years” but, rather, the more socially an-chored term hijja.20 The agricultural societies to the south in Yemen did

have their own calendar, and the few sedentary communities, whose trade

ventures depended on the seasons and increments thereof, are also known

to have had a certain form of calendar before the coming of Islam.21 But

life in the desert recognized a periodicity of time only on the basis of an

“event.” Various events, of course, do not have the same status in memory,

at least for the purposes of organizing the temporal dimension. Unlike

such events as tribal wars, for instance, a pilgrimage recurs with respect to

a stable destination. The meaning of the pilgrimage is located as much,

and perhaps more, in the destination’s geographic materiality as in its

spiritual significance. None of the ancient poets, to be sure, elaborates

much on the religious significance of the pilgrimage itself: It is simply a

certain recurring activity that is useful to measure time with, in those in-

stances when a measurement of the magnitude of times elapsed is called

for. And it is the peculiarity of this measuring that brings into the poemthis short-lived notion of an entity within time. Twenty cycles. Twenty re-

currences of the same event. Twenty revivals of a sameness. Twenty inter-

ruptions by the predictable. Twenty nonsurprises. The actual event, that

is, that which the memory ventures to bring forth by reflecting against a

flow of nonevents, lies twenty pilgrimages ago. The poetic drama, the first

instance of a strictly individual original innovation, occurs at this junc-

ture of noticing time and bringing it back to the discourse with its full

force. The speaker who takes note of meanings within time in this fashionhalts to dispense elements of wisdom.

There is, after all, a certain magic for enumeration, a certain humbling




impact that comes from all certitudes of regularity and cyclicity of nature.

One loses the nervousness of the moment, the suspicion in the possibility

of the different, hiding away in some unknown future dimension. The

ruins reveal truth in its bare essence. Though minimal in dimension and

barely present, nothing else in the surrounding nature obstructs their

view. Though they invite lamentation and tears poured out to a point just

one step away from self-annihilation, there is nothing in them that is

not natural or normative. Rather, they are the spatial proof of time, with

which one must come to terms. Thus, Zuhair adjusts, as all wise men do,

bids the dwelling a hearty good morning (c. 6),22 and proceeds elsewhere.

There is no more weeping at that stage, simply a contentment with and a

naturalization of the phenomenon of traces.

waiting

The contentment with and eventual wandering away from the traces,

though evident substantive themes in the odes, did not by themselves pro-

vide the “essence” of the poetic experience. In a more social and commu-

nicative sense, poetry here—the mu‘allaqat, the mufaddaliyyat (the pres-

tigious ones), and other less canonical productions—was implicated in a

preservative activity paralleling but more successful than that by which

the desert preserved physical traces of past lives and sociabilities. Poetry

was being memorized, taught, and recited across long distances. A unique

structure lodged in a living language, thus, seemed to offer a possibility of

persisting and outlasting death.

The poet, however, survived only according to a certain model provid-

ed by the social context in which “his” production was involved. The pre-served speech was indeed attributed to an individual name, but that name

was followed by an extended genealogy, a story of trials and tribulations,

and an account for the context of poetic production. The preservability

and pedagogic value of such a speech—and of its context—also reinte-

grated the poet into the tribe. No longer automatic outcasts, poets be-

came highly prestigious and valued members of the tribe.

Before their pedagogic, moral, and political value was discovered, poets

were aware that they had to continually seek readmission to the tribe. Tono avail, Imru’ l-Qays tried to prove that he was more tenacious in up-

holding tribal obligations than his more conformist brothers. Tarafa died




an outcast, driven to his death by a blind adherence to instructions not

to read his own execution order, which he was carrying to the governor of

Bahrain; his more conformist companion had the foresight to violate a

similar order and, though failing to convince Tarafa to do the same, at

least managed to save his own life. Tarafa’s ode, indeed, seeks to make ten-

tative amends, such as when he imagines his return to the tribe to prepare

for his own death, armed with a new identity, and confident of a tenacious

worthiness (c. 93–101). He speaks as though free of worries, but it is too

late in the day to provide a pedagogy for the future. That was to become

the business of the more established poets, those who found no reason to

struggle with a problematic belonging or to undergo the tortured agony

of transformation, that is, those who were speaking when poetry itself was a respected institution, indeed, the only institution to be preserved as

is, unscathed by time. They were speaking at the moment when it was dis-

covered that nothing survives time but language.

The survivability of language was to effect a reconsideration of the

components of the conceptual family of useful deeds, which in its earlier

version had led to Tarafa’s predicament. A postpoetic version of this con-

ceptual family addressed the enigma of eternal survival, hitherto an un-

thinkable notion. The immortality of the poem and similarly structured

productions was grafted upon recordable dimensions of the social con-

text—genealogy and story—within which it was produced. A sinking ship

sends out a signal not to plead for an impossible rescue but, more impor-

tantly, to leave a record of its existence and to register its demise at a par-

ticular point in time, a time whose coordinates are the genealogy and the

story with which the poem will invariably appear. In comparison to the

poem, the entirety of lived life appears more like an event, an outburst onthe undifferentiated surface of sameness, a forgettable aberration of the

ongoing nonbeing, meager traces scattered about a vast sea of silence. It is

those juxtaposed words that, precisely because of their apparent endur-

ance, promise to salvage any context associated with them from the teeth

of time, whose legacy is what the ode always acknowledges at its ceremo-

nial commencement. In this manner, poetry became a carrier of a hitherto

little-discerned notion of “hope,” a category of thought inconceivable

without an orientation toward the future. With the advent of poetry, onelooks beyond the moment,beyond life itself.Life here is no longer an event

but a persistent social chronicle, carried over from one vein into another.




The delineation of what is to be lost and what is to be preserved begins

at the moment of recording, which interrupts the timeless dissipation of

life and its events into less than traces. It is a curious point in time when

the very flow of time is itself noticed, when the speechlessness of the land

is brought into questioning, when the enormous diffusion of nature ap-

pears to warrant a rearrangement by designations, oral and otherwise.

The advent of preservation also changed the social nature of poetry.

The wild individual spirit that had guided the earlier poets was tempered

by the celebration of poetry within traditional society. The continuous

search for wonders in the world by the outcasts was now to give way to

moral themes. Under earlier conditions, although the poets were aware of

time, they could be oblivious to it by being oblivious, simultaneously, toall preservative efforts insofar as such efforts restricted hedonism. All such

efforts were regarded, not unreasonably, to be pointless. Equally aware

of such pointlessness, established poets like Zuhair nonetheless found a

virtue in codes of conduct advising all to be on guard lifelong and to con-

tinually search for conditions that would allow one to persist as long as

possible, but certainly not forever.

Zuhair, of course, was keenly aware of the context of tribal wars per-

meating his moment in history, a moment whose aura required taking

into account more than the free play of hedonism. In the emerging con-

text of a dire need for general sobriety and abstention from excessive claims,

codes of manner and conduct—such as were spelled out in Zuhair’s ode

(c. 47–58)—were posited as demure but necessary expectations from life,

which itself became a long, disorienting agony. Thus, the poetic codifica-

tion of manners of (modest and temporary) survival were couched in an

aura of a necessary humility and attention to the pointlessness of any grand schemes of preservation. Thus, neither hedonism nor survival be-

came possible. The weary man who had composed such a code announced

likewise his reasons, his conclusions, his fatalisms: “I have seen,” Zuhair

says,“the Fates trample like a purblind camel; those they strike / they slay,

those they miss are left to live on to dotage” (c. 57).

“I have seen”: Zuhair is a witness. A very old one indeed, convinced

that he himself had been missed by the Fates too many times, so much so

that he became weary of waiting for death. He knows that his code of manners, pronounced in a context governed by the imposing presence

of mortality, is no more than a feeble offer of compromise with the forces




of destiny, a compromise intended to allow the human actor a bit of con-

trol so as not to be crushed prematurely. Here, waiting becomes a phe-

nomenon. There is, on the one hand, the promise of overcoming a set of

destructive forces in the nature of human society by adhering to the code.

On the other hand, there is the march of time, which ensures that any

such overcoming is only temporary. In this context, overcoming the de-

structive potentials of human society becomes an attempt at waiting for

the more legitimate victory of time. The code, which pedagogically advis-

es individual action, contemplates as well the torment of passive waiting.

The question, then, becomes how to valorize waiting. The search for a

purpose behind waiting not only makes it more possible as a standard

practice but also brings closer to consciousness the depleting operation of time that accompanies or even defines it. Purpose, here, is the ethic that

accounts for waiting for an exterior and natural progression to take its

proper course.As he discovers this agony, Zuhair endows his own life with

a purpose, which is to dispense his accumulated wisdom to a new genera-

tion. It is that accumulation itself that proves that the elapsed time had

been doing more than simply elapsing. Since it could be preserved as a

reservoir of learned wisdom, it was defined by more than pointless wait-

ing. Since wisdom is transmittable, waiting provides communicative ac-

tion with a purpose as the locus of a preservationist endeavor. Since such

preservationist efforts stabilize the practice of waiting itself, waiting be-

comes possible not on the basis of the code of behaviors provided earlier

in Zuhair’s mu‘allaqa but on the basis of waiting’s potential to add to social

and collective knowledge. Waiting thus becomes a complicated activity,

with an ontological status superseding lonely presence within a monotony

of time. It is through this operation that knowledge—transmittable, pre-servable, earned, recordable, forthcoming—infuses the practice of waiting

with a life other than that defined purely by the span of time:

I know what is happening today, and what passed over

before that yesterday,

but as for knowing what tomorrow will bring, there I’m

utterly blind. (c. 59)

In the final words of Zuhair’s phenomenal speech, this verdict is deliveredon the relationship of the self and the ode to knowledge. This is a speech

infused with the knowledge that time has made available. That the future




is not known is announced as a fact. In an important sense, the future

does not need to be known. All one needs to know about the future is al-

ready in the code of manners (c. 47–58). The code, after all, is premised

on the predictability of outcome of the instructed behavior. The un-

knowability of the future could therefore relatively easily be dispensed

with, even though it is the sphere of time that is certain to arrive. So this

foreknowledge, which is the stuff of waiting, is already stabilized by being

lodged in the depth of a general structure of grand and comprehensive

ethos.

Such a structure is oriented trilaterally. It is grounded first and foremost

on a certain fatalism, which underpins the practice and ethic of waiting for

finitude and downplays the unknowability of the future. Second, it pro-vides a structure and promise of predictability, articulated as a guide in the

form of code and consequence. Third, it grounds knowledge upon a cer-

tain naturalism: that which is worth knowing shall be revealed because of

its own virtue, without advocacy or effort (see, for instance, couplet 58).

One’s own nature, so the discourse professes, cannot be hidden. There is

an unanchored faith in the necessity of this natural unfolding of the self.

After this search for an instrumentality, at the end of the speech, at the

final moments of this journey, when a conclusion was to seal the series of

adventures with the stamp of a totality of knowledge made available by

time elapsed, there stood faith with arms outstretched to receive the in-

quirer and share with him a permanent abode, outfitted with nothing but

an elaborate scheme for waiting. There they were to rest, poet and unan-

chored faith, from then on together, until a transcendental God anchored

the faith in a realm beyond the vagaries of unaccountable time.




Spiritual life in the immediate pre-Islamic era consisted of paganism,

book religions, and Hanifism. None of these could be confidently thought

of as a “finished product” in its own right. Such movements and practices

are best conceived of as trends of belief, open to diversity, amendment,

and experimentation. As we shall see, trends of spiritual life were defined

more on the basis of verbal pronouncements than on the basis of doctri-

naire following. Traces of this oral priority can be detected in Islam, whose

first pillar of faith was the utterance of the formula professing that there is

no God but Allah, and that Muhammad is his messenger.Before Islam, manifestations of irreverence toward existing religions

were abundant. This phenomenon notwithstanding, much of narrative

history concerned with the period deals with pre-Islamic “Judaism” and

“Christianity,” for instance, as if they were finished and well-defined bod-

ies of belief. Little mention is made of their specific and peculiar shape in

that society, the underlying assumption being that “believers” have the

same interpretation or degree of attachment to their faith regardless of

the various historical and social contexts within which an expression of faith takes place. In much of orientalist literature, one finds a prevalent

normative assumption of bodies of faith as separable conceptual realms.

79

four

Pre-Islamic Ontotheology

and the Method of Knowledge



“Jewish tradition,” for instance, is presented as an exclusive body of

thought, from which elements could be seen to be “borrowed,” even if

they follow a different developmental trajectory.1 Such a perspective ig-

nores the essential fluidity of spiritual concepts through much of pre- and

even post-Islamic Arabia. While the concept “Jew,” for instance, could be

treated as a marker of tribal identity—among other things—it did not

necessarily designate a unique repository of particular ontotheological

or cosmological principles, which, even before Islam, could float across

tribal lines.

Apart from the factors that can be attributed to its relation to tribal

politics (to be examined later, especially in Chapter 7), the triumph of

Islam, according to the hypothesis being introduced here, was precisely due to a situation in which it seemed to offer a persuasively comprehen-

sive, interpretive schema and guide for life, with respect to a particular

sociohistorical moment. Though the existence of spiritual precursors to

Islam during the Jahiliyyah (pre-Islamic era) is symptomatic of a crisis,

their irrelevance manifested itself in their parochial or uncertain hold

over society. Islam itself, thus, can be understood not as a unique doctrine

but as a product of a long social learning process. While presenting itself

as an alternative system, it incorporated elements that predated it in spiri-

tual life, folk traditions, and biblical ontotheology.

paganism and the idea of the ritual

Paganism was the belief against which early Islam had to wage its fiercest

fight. Such a struggle consumed a great deal of Muhammad’s efforts and

ultimately determined the direction of much of his teaching. The argu-ment here is not that paganism was strong but only that it was wide-

spread. The pervasiveness or even persistence of a certain belief does not

necessarily indicate its strength; it merely indicates the absence of a more

historically and socially grounded alternative. Pagan deities were relative-

ly weak, and their level of abstract eminence, as Muhammad duly noticed,

was embarrassingly low for a god worthy of increasing duties assigned to

the realm of deity. In addition, though the traditional narrative empha-

sizes pagan resistance to Islam and the persecution of the early believers,it is worth keeping in mind that the speed with which Islam consolidated

itself as a formidable force, even before the death of Muhammad, is aston-

80 • Pre-Islamic Ontotheology



ishing, especially when compared to histories of other world religions.

Such a fact may indicate that Islam’s main spiritual adversary was already

in no condition to put up a genuine and sustained resistance.2

Paganism entailed the worship of a multitude of idols, many of which

were objects of local worship and restricted to certain tribes. But although

they existed among various Arabs, pagan rituals and beliefs were much

more evident in Mecca than anywhere else in the peninsula. The develop-

ment of the central spiritual role of Mecca before Islam, as shown, closely

paralleled its ascendancy as a trade center. Other objects of worship, such

as stars and fire, existed as well among the Bedouins, but the preeminence

of the idols to a large extent shaped the contours of the ontotheological

campaign of early Islam.3

On the one hand, paganism offered the pre-Islamic Arabs an explana-

tory framework for nature. But on the other, such a framework was de-

void of guidance for practical life or warning of ethical consequences.

Reports exist of consulting an idol before embarking on a journey, war, or

other significant affair in life. A well-known report, which concerns Imru’

l-Qays, shows that it was neither necessary to obtain nor obligatory to fol-

low the advice of the idols. According to the legend, Imru’ l-Qays consult-

ed his idol three times before he set out to take revenge for the murder of

his father. Consistently receiving discouraging advice, he cursed the idol,

remarking that it would not have given such an answer had the affair con-

cerned its own father. What is interesting in this story is the clear indica-

tion not only that the idol’s verdict was by no means binding but, more-

over, that, as Imru’ l-Qays compares his own predicament to a possible

one concerning the idol’s father, he discerns little distance between the

two. There are reports that indirectly confirm the idols’ distance fromlocal traditions, asserting that idol worship had no local peninsular roots,

having been imported from Syria by a Meccan chief who learned that they

were used to bring rain and as a moral aid against enemies, and that they

were only modified within Arabia.4

Pagan idols do not seem to have had any division of labor among

them. Unlike in other pantheist mythologies, the various idols had no

specific functions and responsibilities ascribed to them, even though some

were more greatly honored than others.5 Only a few had a mythology giv-ing the origin of their holiness, and even then, such an interpretation made

little impact on their status. Usaf and Na’ila were, according to myth, two

Pre-Islamic Ontotheology • 81



fornicators in the haram (sanctuary) who were punished by being trans-

formed permanently into idols.6 Their sinful origin clearly had little im-

pact on their status as objects of worship. Ibn al-Kalbi’s account stresses

the fact that their holiness stemmed more from the fact that they resem-

bled the stones abundant around them in the haram than from the moral

lessons of the story of their genesis.

As weak deities, idols were incapable of doing harm or good, as

Muhammad was to repeatedly remind Meccans. Such an invocation of

the need for action on the part of a deity was in some way original, since

pagan objects of worship never pretended to offer a complete system of

life. The social virtues stressed by Bedouins and Meccans bore no neces-

sary relationship to paganism, and furthermore they probably precededit. There is a paucity of reports offering any credible hints that such deities

had much to do with moral direction or guidance to everyday, practical

life. Rather, most social arrangements and bonds continued to be pre-

figured by given genealogical traditions, in the context of a past-oriented

society. This orientation continued to frame Meccan consciousness even

after nomadism was far from view and outside society’s regular options.

The intensity of the past as the only legitimate venue of mores was most

directly registered in Mecca in the innumerable pagan objections to

Muhammad that he had violated the spiritual order given by the fore-

fathers—and not simply that his logic was wrong. More systematically

and eloquently, however, the heavy weight of the past was ritually af-

firmed in the ponderous possibility of its loss, the generalized tradition

seen most clearly in the openings of the odes adjudicated in ‘Ukaz, the

marketplace near Mecca, at the conclusion of the annual trade cycle.7

Standing at the ruins, as mentioned before, became the traditional imagewith which to begin an ode.

There are some qualifications to be made here, however. A discursive

tradition does not always immediately indicate an experienced resonance,

even though the origin of such a tradition may be traced to such an expe-

rience. Normally one speaks of a “tradition” when a form of expression or

practice is seen to have survived beyond the original moment of birth or

utterance, when such a form or practice has been reproduced according

to a relatively stable order of recurrence. Whether the notion of a “tradi-tion” could also refer to the continued survival of the original experience

that had unleashed the form by which it was expressed is a more difficult




question. It is always possible that widely different experiences could ex-

press themselves through a single ubiquitous form, that quite divergent

orientations could inhabit, claim, or utilize a form of discourse that sig-

nals a certain “tradition.” Such notions are common currency in late-

twentieth-century criticism. Here we have our hands on a peculiar variant

of a form of discourse, commonly referred to as a “tradition,” that func-

tioned in interesting ways. For many Arabs, this was the first tradition to

become firmly, but perhaps not exclusively, lodged in language rather

than in physical objects. There are other fragments from the period that

do not begin with the ruins theme; nor are they of the same length, inten-

sity, expressive vigor, or legendary status as the mu‘allaqat (odes). There

are also less elegantly preserved fragments of rhymed, ordinary language,commonly addressing issues of cosmology, ethics, and wisdom, ascribed

to certain prophetic characters about whom little is known.

But, in standing at the ruins, we have the genesis of a form of speech

that many aspired to revisit. There is therefore the first constitutive ele-

ment of what we call tradition, namely, a recognizable point of return.

How is that appeal constituted? Is it the potency of its delivery? Is there,

therefore, an essential communicable nature peculiar to this point of re-

turn,or does it survive precisely because of its enigma, its open-endedness,

its responsiveness to a multitude of manipulative and cumulative possi-

bilities? Or, perhaps, is there a residue of the original experience that the

form spelling out the discursive product allows later listeners to smell and

thus hope to revive through an act of emulation? How was it that, of all

other possible forms, this expression of a perpetual loss of the past became

the foundation of a tradition? Or was a “tradition” being attempted in the

way of forms, and was this one clung to not because of any reason latent inits essence but, rather, because of an unanchored but refined character of

its word sequence? Or was it not “refined”character that was the determin-

ing factor but simply the accident of it having been spoken first?

What we know with the highest degree of certainty is how the tradition

was expressed. By discerning the various openings of the mu‘allaqat, cer-

tain suggestions regarding the nature of the tradition begin to emerge.

Tarafa Ibn l-‘Abd, generally regarded by the ancients as the heir to the leg-

endary poet Imru’ l-Qays, almost copied the latter’s opening couplet in theprominently placed second couplet of his own ode: “There my compan-

ions halted their beasts awhile over me / saying, ‘Don’t perish of sorrow;




bear it with fortitude!’” In the original language, this and Imru’ l-Qays’s

rendition differ only by one word, the last, which occurs at the crucial lo-

cation determining the rhythm. Only this line, together with the first cou-

plet, constitute the traditional opening of Tarafa’s ode, whereafter differ-

ent digressions ensue. Thus, half of Tarafa’s extremely short flirtation with

the traditional opening theme is a near word-for-word duplication of the

master. The disseminating oral tradition, as it seems, was troubled neither

by such a “plagiarism” nor by the brevity of Tarafa’s salute to the tradition.

And in a similar vein, Zuhair Ibn Abi Sulma imitates those poets preced-

ing him: In his mu’allaqai, the second couplet pays homage to Tarafa’s

opening line and his third to Imru’ l-Qays’s third!

In this light, tradition seems to include ritual plagiarism, at least at theexpressive, formulaic level. The theme of perpetual loss and ruin, as the

“substance” of this tradition, resonated differently within Bedouin and

sedentary societies. For the nomads, loss and dying were regular norms of

nature; they needed no metaphysical camouflage, and the ode did not

venture to offer any. Only the language of mourning itself mitigated the

loss. The Bedouins’ materialism was associated with the relative simplicity

of their life. The nature of their economy was seen as a direct result of the

natural surroundings. Here we have a society with no surplus production

and no class distinctions, an economy of bare and uncertain survival re-

flecting itself directly in the culture, a social equality of chances of fortune

and misfortune and thus no hidden secrets of survival. None of the stones

or idols that the Bedouins worshipped ever neared the status of the ones

worshipped by the sedentary tribes, and the Bedouins evidently had little

trust in their own idols. Death itself had no explanation beyond time and

aging.These elements, which consolidated an unchanging tradition and atti-

tude among nomads, were not as operative in a sedentary society that had

to redefine its posture toward the notion of loss. It was in Mecca that

paganism reigned supreme, to a degree almost unparalleled anywhere else

in the peninsula. The efforts of the city contributed most singularly to

the spread of paganism, as well as to enshrining the resulting sanctity of

Mecca. Evidently still inspired by the nomadic model of permeability of

culture and economy, many of the city’s competitors clearly saw parallelsbetween its economic and spiritual centrality and sought likewise to en-

shrine parallel sanctuaries, although without as much success.8




Though the connection between transtribal, supralocal exchange and

holy sites or sanctuaries was evident elsewhere in Arabia, the specific ex-

pression of such holiness in idol worship cannot be as directly connected

to banal interest. One of the ancient accounts mentioned earlier simply

saw idols as “imports” from Syria, much like any other trade item, but an-

other account stresses at least the local mutation of such a tradition. Ibn

al-Kalbi traced the worship of stones to the ancient migrations away from

Mecca after the lost times of the Amalikites, when each migrating group

took with it a stone from the haram as a sign of reverence and a constant

reminder of Mecca. Out in the wilderness, they began to “worship what

they loved” (‘abadu ma s-tahabbu).9

At the semiological level, the endowment of physical objects withmeanings is premised upon anchoring such objects in a larger origin (the

haram in this case) that becomes periodically distant with the need for

nomadic migration. Such objects thus operate at the same level as the

ruins in the pre-Islamic ode, namely as discernible, interrogable remains

of a more meaningful but disappearing whole. In both cases, one sees an

elaborate effort to delineate the exact distinction of the object. With pa-

ganism, the object becomes a tribally specific deity, detachable from the

larger spiritual ensemble of the haram. In the ode, a curious effort can be

seen, usually at the opening, to delineate the exact location of the ruins.

This is readily evident in a variety of odes, from Imru’ l-Qays to Labid Ibn

Rabi‘ah. The intensity of the moment of halting is not exclusively invested

in facing the traces of a vanishing abode or in sensing nature’s way of

reclaiming what humans had once sought to claim for their own. Rather,

the gradual reclamation of a place by wilderness calls for an elaborate

documentation. First, the location of the ruins is strictly delineated by extensive naming. (Consider, for example, Labid’s c. 1–2: “The abodes

are desolate, halting-place and encampment too / at Miná; deserted lies

Gaul, deserted alike Rijám, / and the torrent-beds of Er-Raiyán,” or Imru’

l-Qays’s c. 1–2: “Halt, friends both! Let us weep, recalling a love and a

lodging / by the rim of the twisted sands between Ed-Dakhool and

Haumal, / Toodih and El-Mikrát, whose trace is not yet effaced.”)

A name here operates as a primal identity. It is the last step in a labori-

ous process by which an enclosed, self-referencing identity is brought outfrom its prior gestation within a larger domain (the haram for pagan ob-

jects, the previous encampment for the ode). As a discursive product,




such a name is also the final stamp, the last signature of a specific creator.

The Qur’an itself registers this discovery in the contentious surah (chap-

ter) of an-Najm—to be discussed at length in Chapter 7—in which the

prominent idols are explicitly condemned as nothing but names assigned

by the forefathers and followed blindly by their descendants. In that

Qur’anic passage, a “mere” name is contrasted to actual authority in the

world, which God denies to the idols.10

But in the ode, and presumably under paganism as well, the name had

little to do with an act of creation. It was, rather, a reservoir, that portion

of an identity by which it could become easily discernible for the sake of a

future discourse about it. As such, it guaranteed that a discourse could be

reproduced indefinitely and economically. In this form, a name is muchlike the paradigm defined by Thomas Kuhn: an invocation nullifying the

need to reiterate a lengthy multitude of significations, characteristics, and

rules anew. Such a paradigmatic significance of the name is premised on

an assumption of a unanimity regarding what the name signifies. It is also

based on an assumption of synonymity—a complete and natural con-

foundment, an absolute elimination of distance—between the name and

the essence of the object that it signifies. The name, thus, functions most

ideally when it is subjected to a condition of hearing that senses in its ut-

terance the collectivity of possible deliberations about the object. A name

that met such requisites signified an identity that was seen to be timeless.

Before existence across the span of time could be ordered by an abstract

divinity, the most successful form of resistance to the phenomenality of

time was paradigmatic naming.

On the other hand, names of places as they occur in the traditional

openings signify an emergent crisis. The ode usually begins by noting thatthe volumes of experiences that had been wrapped up by a name are

about to disappear in a remarkably unsparing way. The habitat is about to

slip away from the grips of the creative human subject. The promise of

permanence first certified by the name is aborted. A project at creation is

halted and then reversed. We could see how transient the whole project

was in the fact that in order for a speech about a place to begin, it required

several geographic references and anchoring points. There was in that

construction a lurking teleology, an invitation to wait for a stable mean-ing to come about. Instead of that delivery, now the poet comes back to

the site to witness it at the final moments of its dispersal back into the




enormous diffusion of nature from whence it came. In this recurring,

ritualistic termination, the ruins reveal an element of their ontology, for

here they are no longer mere remains from a past into which a lover is

irretrievably deposited; rather, they are the remains of an arrested birth of

permanent and total construction, for which the name was a placeholder.

Thus, whereas for the nomad the ritual of regarding ruins coincided

with periodic interruption of the regular flow of time and life, Meccan

idols enshrined such an interruption in the form of a total social meaning

of tribal isolation and self-sufficiency. Thus, with the idols, the status of

the ritual moved from interrupting the flow of nature and time to arrest-

ing the flux of continual social rearrangements. In Mecca, idols proliferat-

ed in and around the haram in a way that allowed most of the tribes in thepeninsula, as tribes, to anchor a spiritual claim in and obligation to a dis-

tant but stable house.

Mecca’s idols fulfilled both external and internal functions.11 Extern-

ally, they became an integral part of the process of providing Mecca with a

central sociopolitical role in the peninsula. Pilgrimage, as a periodic voy-

age toward sacred tribal objects housed in the haram, was a fundamental

ritual in that process. But it was the haram as a house of sacred objects, not

the haram itself, that was the pilgrim’s destination. This reflected—at least

in part—the fact that the various social units in the peninsula lacked cen-

tral political authority, lived separately for most of the year, spoke different

dialects, inhabited a desert terrain marked by enormous impediments to

communication, and were primarily connected by a trade cycle that took

form prior to any political consolidation, leaving trading partners in rela-

tive cultural isolation from each other. In his study of today’s Bedouins,

Meeker observed that the Bedouin image of God involved attributes thatresonated strikingly with the Bedouin lifestyle, that visions of hell and

paradise addressed the problems of desert landscapes, and that assign-

ment to either was seen in terms of tribal affiliation rather than in terms of

an individual’s deeds.12 This shows a lack of belief or interest in the possi-

bility of transcending existing horizons and conditions, but it also shows a

firm ground for the tribal self-reference in terms of irreducible totalities.

Recent research argues that totemism was a prevalent form of accounting

for a tribe’s origin and legitimacy in pre-Islamic Arabia.13 In this case, thetotem must be interpreted not exclusively in terms of psychoanalysis but

as a protopolitical sign of tribal independence.




The dialectic between the norm of tribal distinction and the interrup-

tion of that distinction by transtribal cycles (trade, migration, intertribal

marriage) paralleled a ritualistic system typified by a place-centered com-

bination of local and general spirituality. Distinct tribes had distinct ob-

jects of worship, though they observed the general sanctity of the haram

that housed such diverse objects. This pattern, which is strikingly similar

to a dialectic of local spiritual autonomy coupled with reference to a com-

mon holy center, can be observed elsewhere in the ancient Near East (for

instance, Nippur in ancient Mesopotamia), testifying to a long tradition

of confluence between year-long local isolation and cyclical patterns of

supralocal communication. In this case, the combination of the tribal

specificity of each idol with the general sanctity of the haram providedMecca with a nonhegemonic form of spiritual centrality in the land.

This phenomenon of nonhegemonic spiritual centrality closely paral-

leled a trade-based economy, territorially extended far beyond the reach of

the available means of coercive control. The source of Meccan wealth was

based on the surplus of transactions with the outside world rather than on

exploitation within the city itself. The increase and stabilization of trade

required a move beyond monopolistic efforts and earlier attempts to limit

the number of participants to a system characterized by an expansion of

the network of participants and the extension of common forms of spiri-

tual citizenship.14 One of the marks of such a shift is the end of the practice

of i‘tifad (individual family withdrawal from the community after com-

mercial failure and subsequent suicide by voluntary starvation) in the

trading sedentary community through the introduction of the principle

of shared investment and responsibility for collective well-being.

Though some holy sites and objects may have existed in more diffusedstates prior to the inception of long-distance trade, the significance of the

contacts brought about by trade induced an added and regular spiritual

investment in such spiritual guides. In itself, this added layer of ritualistic

regularity does not necessarily infuse paganism with strongly binding

guiding principles for practical affairs, with explanations for the nature of

things, or with ethical directions that would be expected to form in a soci-

ety based on exchange and borrowing. Before the coming of Islam as a

comprehensive system of explanation and guidance, such voids set thestage for various reform figures and movements, as well as for ad hoc

protopagan attitudes toward such problems, to be explored shortly.




The socialization of the phenomenon of poetry before Islam also points

to such ethical directions. In the odes, one can detect a variety of stages in

the ideas of sociability and obligation, some of which have already been

discussed. But in general, one can see a move from an exiled, highly indi-

vidualistic involvement in the objects of pristine nature, represented by

ostracized poets such as Imru’ l-Qays and Tarafa, to the formation of the

poetic form as a tradition, as epitomized by the likes of Zuhair, Labid,

‘Antara, and many other less well known poets. Here, poetry becomes not

simply a mode of commentary upon exterior nature but a reservoir of

moral ethos and logics of social attachment. In a third stage, the poets be-

come exclusively defined by specific sociabilities, whereby the poet largely

represents a collective subject, as the cases of ‘Amru and al-Harith illus-trate. Thus we see the metamorphosis of a distinct form of discourse and

commentary, from ontology to ethics to sociability. With each metamor-

phosis, the range of poetic reflection is narrowed, precisely as the poetic

form becomes more socially expansive.15

The socialization of this form of discourse reflects not so much some-

thing essential in language itself as an interest in taming an observed loss

in the perpetual encounter with the ruins. When the poet becomes a

spokesperson for the tribe, it is because the tribe sees itself as a stable and

transgenerationally present audience, in spite of the ruins everywhere in

sight. Thus, as a preservatory discourse, poetics became the depository of

all elements of value to be shipped across time. Value, thus, began to be

moved in bits and pieces under the jurisdiction of this language.16 The

historically recurrent irony, which can also be discerned in prophetic ex-

periences, is that the very introduction of such discursive forms is attrib-

uted to individuals who are totally oblivious to social norms—in this caseto a few posthumously celebrated outcasts.

reformers, h anifism, pagan monotheism

According to traditional sources, pre-Islamic “prophets” or reformers do

not appear to have been in short supply.17 They are frequently reported to

have made the same observation that Muhammad made regarding the

idols, namely, that they were “harmless and helpless”creatures. Referencesto a transcendental power, and even the word “Allah,” are frequently en-

countered, albeit in vague connotations, in the pre-Islamic literature.




(Indeed, many commentators have used such recurrences as evidence that

Islam fabricated an older tradition rather than as evidence that Islam itself

was embedded in pre-Islamic traditions.) At least one of the figures in this

story, al-Mutalammes Ibn Umayyah, is reported to have offered a “compro-

mise” whereby Allah was to be worshipped exclusively, albeit as the “lord of

the idols.”18 One of the earliest recorded references to a transcendental God

is traced by the sources to a period long preceding Muhammad, namely,

to the days when Mecca was inhabited by Khuza‘ah, before Quraysh.

The few available records regarding pre-Islamic pilgrimage rituals hint

at the roots of some monotheistic beliefs that were later highlighted in

Islam. These include the famous talbiyat (responses to divine calling) ut-

tered during the pilgrimage, of which no fewer than two dozen were incirculation among various tribes.19 Compilations of talbiyat seem to indi-

cate that various tribes believed in a supreme God, in addition to their

own, more specialized ones. The tribally specific rendition of talbiyat ac-

centuates separate tribal identity by emphasizing the uniqueness of its

response to a divine call while simultaneously affirming the universal

nature of the addressee and the call.

Paganism and monotheism thus should not be regarded as stark and

exclusive contrasts. Kister shows that although Carl Brockelmann and

Hamilton A. Gibb start from different foundations and use different sources,

they arrive at a similar conclusion, namely, that Islam was grounded more

in the Jahiliyyah than in Jewish or Christian traditions, contesting thereby

some important lines of orientalist inquiry.20 Though this argument can

itself be contested on the conceptual ground of the clear distinctions it

presumes between pre-Islamic textual and nontextual traditions, it does

acknowledge the monotheistic aspect of paganism. It would be more tothe point to say that there was also a certain degree of confluence between

paganism and the book religions.

God, as evidenced in the talbiyat, occupied a higher realm within a

pantheist hierarchy, but as a concept he became clearly distinct from the

materialist pagan idols under his common jurisdiction. “God,” in this

sense, was not destined to be an abstract concept through some logical

necessity. Rather, he could also be seen as a placeholder for a specially

magnificent idol, who would come to place the other idols under its sway as the power of the tribe worshipping it was enhanced. As mentioned be-

fore, there is evidence that tribes vied to have their idols predominate, or




“injustice” must be dealt with on the scene and very swiftly, as unpleasant

surprises in desert conditions presented the Bedouins with life or death

issues with regular frequency. Such is not the image that can be discerned in

the poetic tradition of the ruins, with its normativization and surrender

to the eventuality of loss. But it must be kept in mind that such a tradition

was established by (or, more importantly, attributed to) outcasts from the

tribe. Though emulated by socially more established poets, other themes—

pedagogy and wisdom, love, belonging, and so on—usually counter-

balanced the initial image of complete surrender to the work of fate.

But it is in the poems of those poets entrusted with being tribal spokes-

persons that we detect an element of derision toward the ruins traditions

and, subsequently, toward the notion that perpetual loss could be a norm of nature, over which the individual would have no control. Thus, the heroic

ode of ‘Amru Ibn Kalthum is the only one from that period to open with a

theme other than that of the ruins.23 Indeed,‘Amru’s unique defiance of the

traditional opening has led many commentators to speculate that the first

seven to nine couplets were additions to the original mu‘allaqa, although,

so the theory goes, they would be very early additions. Yet this is what the

oral tradition has delivered, by way of a long poem whose tone, from begin-

ning to end, seems to be consistent: ‘Amru’s is an ode of explosions and

heroisms, flavored with a bit of love and some drinking. It is a mix of sorts,

all conditioned by a mood of uncontrollable, almost lawless tempest. The

ode opens with the dawn.The day to follow is about to be made by the hero.

He mourns no already-made ruins, no past, and no otherness. More pre-

cisely, he manifests no longing for a lost or sought-after authenticity. A self-

confident hero seeks no roots in a primal identity. Rather, he makes his own

world with his own hands, recognizing in the ruins not a loss but a worldoffering itself for an encyclopedic rendition. ‘Amru, thus, demolishes the

ruins and begins anew in the early hour. Temporality is dissociated from

and made to overpower spatiality, with no names or specification of any lo-

cation. Now a different logic flows. This logic seems to be articulated with

respect to a spirit of indulgence, where praiseworthy wine

. . . swings the hotly desirous from his passion

when he has tasted them to gentle mellowness;

you see the skinflint miser, when the cup’s passed him,

suddenly holds his prized property in derision. (c. 3–4)




The key is transformability. (And while we are at it, it might be added that

we are all mortals [c. 7]). The claims of ‘Amru’s ode concern a reconstitu-

tion and, in a very peculiar way, a reaffirmation of the idea of the acting

subject, a recasting of the idea in the context of an awareness of mortality.

But such an awareness does not take place in an inert state of conscious-

ness. Seeing that the tradition has become congested with images of ruins

proving the power of time, the poet proclaims his indifference to mor-

tality, indeed, his power over it. His indulgence is constructed so as to de-

feat all purpose in life. He constructs his own destiny, indeed, his own

ruin, rather than awaiting the blind force of time to do the work. But his

preemption of time targets not only time as an inert concept but also a

tradition that had expressed its surrender to fate by proclaiming the powerof time over all things, places, lives, and loves.

The initiative of the hero-poet to introduce or restore justice com-

mences the second movement of ‘Amru’s ode, which many commentators

regard to be the “true” opening. A scene of an impending separation is

presented. The ruins are yet to appear. The poet, so to speak, is standing at

the preruins stage, preempting their emergence: He is an active rather

than a reactive character. He is also a hero who, unlike the other legendary

heroic poet ‘Antara, possesses the confidence of belonging; his folklorized

biography lists him not only as the poet of Taghlib but also as its leader. So

this is an ode delivered by a political authority. Thus, he is acutely aware of

the role of tribal conflict in his world. As his lover’s tribe prepares for de-

parture, he reminds the audience of a previous skirmish with them, now

to be seen as a “hateful day.” He ponders the impact of that possible injus-

tice (or norm) on the present; now it is time to clear up all records, so that

the impending separation can be properly remembered. Tribal wars them-selves were remediable instances of separation and never reached the

point of total annihilation of an enemy tribe. An awareness of the norma-

tive status of war conditions the tone with which war is addressed in this

sequence. However, that “hateful day” imposes an additional weight on

the moment of recording memory, now that a migration is threatening to

usher in a separation less rectifiable than the separation caused by war

itself. It is noteworthy that this preruins moment infuses in this speak-

ing authority the delusion of being able to transform the flow of timeitself into a perfect stillness of a permanent, full record; that a memory

works its magic in such a way that the prehistory of separation annuls the




torture of its remembrance; and that, at this moment of standing so close

to a loss that one can foresee it, an encyclopedia of the past is assembled to

assess certain moments as being preservable, others as being instructive,

and the rest as to be abandoned, mourned, declaimed. Justice here con-

sists of the proper balance of such mental and discursive operations.

The oral tradition opposes to the force of this subject another poet, al-

Harith Ibn Hilliza of Bakr. His ode is set in the context of a rivalry with

‘Amru and, by extension, with the latter’s kinfolk. Thus, the opening of

this purported antithesis, unlike ‘Amru’s, is extremely orthodox in form.

There is abundant naming of locations. The all-too-common weeping—

and the equally common expression of its futility—follows. The reasons

for this predictability and excessive adherence to formal orthodoxy, seenin light of al-Harith’s competition with ‘Amru, becomes more obvious as

al-Harith’s political references are spelled out later in the ode. The open-

ing introduces several reversals that address ‘Amru’s mood with contempt:

couplet 1 (“Asma’ announced to us . . .”) is comparable to ‘Amru’s so-

norous invocation in his couplet 8 (“Pause yet . . .”). Unlike ‘Amru, al-

Harith is preempted by the departure resolution, even though he, like

‘Amru, begins his ode just before the separation that would eventually

leave the physical traces by which it will be remembered. Al-Harith ac-

cepts the inevitability of the formation of the ruins and makes no effort to

halt the process. The “certainty” is lodged not in a knowledge to be con-

structed by the subject but in realizing the inevitability of what is to be-

come (that is, it is as if the poet says, “I do not tell, because I have no fore-

knowledge to expound, no certitude to exhume from the inventory of my

memory: To the contrary, I am told that she is leaving”). What one is

being told is what will happen. The speech pronouncing the separationoccupies the same moment in time as the separation itself. In pronounc-

ing the separation, the poetic discourse acknowledges not only such con-

temporaneous actuality but also its powerlessness to reverse that actuality.

Thus, it quickly reverts to the ancient practice of naming of locations of

past encounters, which is now understood to indicate the irretrievability

of a loss to be documented.

Thus, unlike in the case of emerging, trade-based sedentarism, loss

under nomadism did not in itself correspond to the concept of “justice.”In fact, permanent loss was impossible, since the world was either pre-

arranged so as to make loss within it invisible (‘Amru), or documented




and entrusted to a preservatory tradition (al-Harith), or deposited into a

perennial, earthly, and possibly transgenerational project at revenge. In

Mecca, in contrast, such attitudes toward the idea of justice began to be

reformulated. Class divisions and fluctuations of fortune no longer pre-

sented an immediate and necessary threat to life as such, especially since

the end of the practice of i‘tifad and the commencement of collaborative

capital investment and caravan expeditions. In that context, the main

issue was not daily survival but relative position and well-being in a strati-

fied society. Here a high God capable of rewarding and punishing on the

basis of ordained ethical relations to fellow society members was both

harmful and helpful. With the concept of justice being increasingly de-

posited in him, one ingredient at a time, such a God was also becomingthe formative subject; the reference point; the witness of documents,

transactions, and agreements; and the model of empowerment invested

in symbolizing collective societal resources.

In addition to the set of practical uncertainties that the growth of

Meccan economy brought to the fore, there were further problems arising

from the nature of trade itself. A wide range of day-to-day transactions

placed a demand for market regulations that, in their abstract nature,

would be adequate for the market’s growing impersonality and scope. It

was no longer simply the buying and selling that mattered but, rather, a

range of transactions that included borrowing, insuring, and valuation.

God makes an appearance after a long period in which increasingly com-

plex transactions lead to a piecemeal development of regulations. In other

words, God, among other things, epitomizes and represents the concern

for regulative efficiency. The absence of an earlier experimentation with

a state apparatus that could accomplish such tasks made the introduc-tion of a high God all the more urgent.24 In this case, he had to take on

such a task from scratch, since the badawah lifestyle had provided no

comparable models of transcendence.25

examples and commentary

Qass Ibn Sa‘idah, “the sage of the Arabs,” is one of the better known

among pre-Islamic “believers.” He was praised by Muhammad, who wasreported to be among his audience in the marketplace of ‘Ukaz.26 His say-

ings, which revolve around the idea of resurrection, begin by pointing to




the certainty of death and the ineluctable eventuality of the future.27 This

orientation toward the future makes the speech itself novel and note-

worthy, since the theme is largely absent from recorded Bedouin literary

heritage, especially in the mu‘allaqat. In the odes, the future held little

promise of being any different from the present. The vantage point of

sedentarization processes, by contrast, led to the realizations that social

metamorphosis was possible and that the general ethical contours of the

future were thus less predictable. There are scattered references in the

literature that suggest a connection between sedentarism and a tragic

understanding of death. M. M. Bravmann has unearthed apparently

seminomadic references to death as a sedentary condition (the deceased

as muqim, “someone who settles permanently”).28

Elsewhere in poetry,one sees either an unconcerned attitude toward death, as in Tarafa and

Zuhair, or, less frequently but more tellingly, an attitude toward death that

considers it to be a tragedy only when it happens in settled towns.29

In the Qass’s speech, after his initial observations (mortality and the

future), he proceeds to reflect on the grounds for nature, especially those

elements of it that are distant or seem to belong to a different realm than

human life: heaven, stars, seas, night, and so on. Thus, the earlier observa-

tions regarding individual fate are combined with observations on nature

to convey a sense of estrangement from both. The next step resolves the

suspicious status of being by tracing both nature and life to a single

source. Since nature itself is seen to control the arrangement of human

life by allowing certain methods of survival and restricting others, then

the force that is capable of controlling nature comes to be defined as the

source of a common origin of being. A discourse that asks, in the same

breath, questions about the nature of things unrelated by existing cosmol-ogy (for example, death, stars) is fundamentally interested in universal

laws, in the origins of all phenomena, and, by extension, in the origins of

their difference. In the case of Qass’s discourse, the conclusion follows

smoothly: There is another world in which there is to be a resurrection.

Thus, the certainty of death, pronounced with a tragic tone at the begin-

ning of the discourse, is downplayed at its conclusion.

This belief in resurrection assures not only a continuity of individual

physical life but an eventual reunification of this life with the society towhich it once belonged and knew before its temporary lapse into death.

The emergence of a nonegalitarian, sedentary society, in which there was




the possibility, and even the certainty, that there would always be some

members more fortunate than others, gave new impetus to the idea of res-

urrection. The classical Marxist position on this issue traces it to the need

to assure the less fortunate members of society that they would certainly

have an opportunity to reclaim that from which they were alienated, given

a learned inability to overcome alienation on earth in this life. On the

other hand, resurrection was part and parcel of an enlarged conception of

life: Questioning what a life was about, what a person was to be, became

large and acutely present obsessions, obsessions to which the nomads had

shown absolute indifference. The question of what one must accomplish

in life gains an immense legitimacy as a question when, by positing in

their faces differentiations they can see, a differentiated society offers itsmembers the possibility of comparison. That is, the nomads realized their

destitution not while they roamed the desert but, rather, when they came

to a city and saw its relative fortune. Only then did they conceptualize the

idea of destitution, and only then did they see themselves as the object

of such a concept. The idea of resurrection postpones—practically and

remorselessly—the need to recompense life for what the possibility of

comparison had revealed as a deficiency in it. With the book religions, we

have a material foundation for the idea of rectifying injustice: As earthly

deprivation took place in a social context, so will the recompense after res-

urrection. Resurrection is not an individual privilege; the whole society is

resurrected, but after resurrection each member will be assigned a com-

pletely different value than he or she held in earthly society.30 Such a so-

cial and hierarchical notion of resurrection is one of the hallmarks of the

book religions, fundamentally this-worldly and social as they were. By

contrast, the pre-Islamic meditations of someone like Qass still presumedresurrection as a basically individual experience.

Other pre-Islamic “believers”possess what the tradition itself acknowl-

edges as more prophetic qualities. Khalid Ibn Sinan, for instance, was re-

portedly called by Muhammad a “prophet lost by [the indifference of] his

people.” According to the sources, Khalid’s daughter, who once encoun-

tered Muhammad as he was praying, commented that the words he used

to assert that Allah is the only God were similar to those used by her late

father.31 Another such figure is Zaid Ibn ‘Amru, who is reported to havecalled on Qurayshans to follow him in adhering to the “faith of Abraham,”

which highlighted the idea of an active God. He is also said to have directly




criticized the worship of the “harmless and helpless” idols, while finding

both Christianity and Judaism to be inadequate alternatives.32 Both, how-

ever, pointed him to the religion of Abraham, which in its undiluted, pri-

mordial form entailed the worship of nothing but Allah.

Muhammad, too, referred the vaguely defined religion of Abraham.

This vagueness is part and parcel of the anticipation of the coming of a

prophet, whose task would be to reestablish a forgotten tradition rather

than to begin a new one. With such a remote background, the prophet to

come could symbolize or effect a complete and irrevocable break with the

present while at the same time basing such a break on the authority of an

authentic past. At least one figure is reported to have refrained from be-

lieving in Muhammad out of envy, since he was hoping that he himself would be the anticipated prophet.33 At least two other famous figures are

reported to have adopted Christianity explicitly as a transitional belief, in

anticipation of the coming of the “true” messenger.34

Such a state of affairs does not in itself necessarily make the task of the

coming prophet any easier, since the empirical prophet, as Muhammad

was to find out in both Mecca and Medina, will be evaluated against pre-

ordained and demanding, almost superhuman standards. Muhammad’s

early failure for Mecca, as will be discussed later, can be clearly attributed

to this anticipation. But even for Medina, where his authority was con-

siderably more established, the literature is replete with stories of dissen-

sion on both practical and ideological grounds. For example, one of the

most important figures to oppose Muhammad in Medina, Abi ‘Amer, did

so because he believed that he was a truer follower of the faith of Abra-

ham (Din Ibrahim) than Muhammad. This may indicate that for some,

Hanifism may not even have needed a prophet, or at least not one whomatched Muhammad’s description, attitudes, and behavior.35

Others, however, like Waraqah Ibn Nawfal, anticipated the coming of

the prophet based on their conviction that the Arabs had lost track of the

religion of Abraham, which Muhammad was now thought to be in the

process of rediscovering. As a Christian, Waraqah helped in part to for-

mulate a link between Islam and the other book religions. According to

him, Muhammad was indeed the prophet promised by Moses and Jesus.

At a later stage, Muhammad was to vehemently capitalize on that point,for he envisioned Islam not only as a fraternal doctrine to the book re-

ligions but also as a logical conclusion to a divine plan of historically




progressive revelations leading to the true faith.36 Thus, such a conceptu-

alization ascribed a unity to various traditions anchored upon the same

divine source while sharply distinguishing it from the profane practice of

paganism.

References to the omnipotence of Allah and his divine justice are like-

wise encountered throughout pre-Islamic literature, most notably in the

legendarized odes of Zuhair Ibn Abi Sulma and ‘Ubayd Ibn l-Abras,37 often

in ways connected to the idea of justice. Under the badawah lifestyle, rec-

tifying injustice was an earthly matter with no metaphysical substitutes. A

story depicting the increasing lack of certainty regarding this notion of

justice as society underwent a transition from badawah to hadarah illus-

trates the point through the words of ‘Abd l-Muttaleb, Muhammad’s uncle.Among his memorable sayings was one affirming that no “unjust” man

would pass away before being punished for his deeds. However, one day,

so the story goes, an unjust man died without receiving due punish-

ment. After contemplating the event, ‘Abd l-Muttaleb concluded that

there had to be another world beyond death, in which justice would finally

be done.38 The story is remarkably simple, but the fact that it had to be

recorded—apart from the need to show the pious nature of the house of

the prophet—illustrates a fundamental conceptual transition, here re-

garding the concept of justice per se rather than that of Allah. It is worth

noting that ‘Abd l-Muttaleb posits the otherworld as an undefined possi-

bility, without explicitly structuring it around the idea of an abstract God.

When justice in the course of life becomes uncertain (that is, justice

understood as a balance of rewards and punishments), the challenge is

either to reformulate the concept of justice or to redefine the course of life

within which justice is to be assured. The problem poses itself thus: Onemust choose either a concept of life as it has traditionally been under-

stood (that is, as exclusively earthly), in which case one will have to accept

the possibility of injustice, or a concept of justice as it has traditionally

been understood, in which case one will have to rethink life’s duration so

that it includes a sphere within which justice is assured of a final triumph.

When life is understood as a total record of a physical entity rather than as

a set of haphazard diachronic fragments, it can scarcely be imagined with-

out a posited value at its conclusion, without the possibility of a verdicton it as a totality, and thus without the possibility of redemption. Once

conceived of as a totality, life cannot exist without the concept of justice.




For the concept of justice is the sum of all such conditions of existence, as

a record being accumulated for the purpose of making verdict possible.

This idea of life as a totality divided between two worlds is fundamen-

tal to early Islam. In fact, the very word “Islam,” according to one thesis,

meant not only resignation or surrender (to Allah) as it is usually rendered

but also “defiance of death.”39 In either case, the will to outlast death can-

not be separated from life’s transformed meaning under sedentarism,

where it was coupled with a requisite of justice that could not be safely

entrusted to the material horizons of life. In the pre-Islamic era, at least

two figures exemplify best the multitude of ramifications stemming from

such reconceptualizations of life, justice, and resurrection: ‘Amer Ibn ad-

Darb and Luqman al-Hakim, or Luqman the Wise.‘Amer Ibn ad-Darb thought of existence in terms of logical necessities

of origin and destiny:“I never saw a thing which had created itself, neither

an object which had not been created, nor an arrival [of someone who]

did not depart. If people died of illness then they would have been resur-

rected by the cure.” Resurrection, according to him, came about through

the intervention of an exterior power, a power that must be capable of

creation in the first place. The necessity of coming back to life (that is,

continuing life) after death is deduced from the logic of creation itself:

“The dead come back to life, and the Nothing comes back as a Thing, and

therefore heavens and earth were created.”40 At first glance, there does not

seem to be an obvious or causal relation between observing human in-

ability to create nature and believing in resurrection. But if nature and

time are posited as unattainable mysteries, and if social life is seen as only

able to produce differentiations that allow self-definition via comparison,

then one’s identity will appear to be formed via an essential otherness.41

This account of an exterior source of self-identity revokes the possi-

bility of thinking of creation in terms of autogenesis. One becomes an ob-

ject under the control of a mysterious force that has become differently

thinkable: One dies and fails to come back through human effort, such as

by the administration of a cure. The power that controls such incompre-

hensible processes is set outside of the realm of the knowable and is gifted

with capabilities unclaimable by the living. When it resurrects the dead,

such a power thereby brings justice to life. Until then, one could compre-hend such a power by assigning to it a range of capabilities that include

hitherto present but unaccounted for accomplishments: It is capable of




resurrecting the dead because it could create heaven and earth. In this as-

sertion there already lurks the dogma of systemic totality, whereby natu-

ral appearances and moral and social life are no longer separable items

of knowledge, in the manner of encyclopedic disjunction typical of the

mu‘allaqat. Rather, these items are causally connected through a grand

source and purpose.

Another figure who illustrates a reconceptualization of life, justice, and

resurrection is the famous sage Luqman the Wise, who was praised by

Muhammad and who is legendarized in the Qur’an, to a degree that it

alludes to his near prophethood. Commentators have noted that figures

possessing the same attributes as Luqman are also known to have circulated

in other ancient traditions—for instance, Ba’laam of the Old Testamentor the Greek Aesop.42 Like Luqman, Ba’laam is semiprophetic, with a prob-

lematic and uncertain relation to political authority. Whereas in such tra-

ditions those figures combined an aura of holiness with mischievous play-

fulness and earthly pleasures, thereby providing a truly resourceful and

varied fountain of wisdom, the figure of Luqman as noted in the Islamic

tradition is largely cleansed of any potentially sinful attributes. This re-

interpretation of a folk character may indeed have been going on well be-

fore the introduction of Islam itself.

According to the lore, Luqman was “given a thousand chapters of wis-

dom, each of which was divided into a thousand sections, each of which

was divided into a thousand branches, each of which comprised a thou-

sand of the different types of knowledge.”43 His character encompasses a

set of contradictions. First of all, he is at the same time the most holy and

the most humble of men. Luqman “never slept during the day, and no one

ever saw him spitting, urinating, defecating, bathing, playing, laughing . . .and he was once married and children were born to him and they died,

[but] he did not mourn their loss.”44 On the other hand, Luqman was at

the same time a freed black slave (mawla ), that is, he belonged to the very

bottom of the social hierarchy. The tradition also states that his wisdom

began to be apparent while he was still a slave, that it was divinely en-

dowed, that he continued to live a humble life after his freedom was

granted, and that he was a contemporary of David. In fact, together with

David he forms an illustrative dichotomy that furnishes Luqman’s cre-dentials and illuminates his distinction.

God needed an earthly governor to adjudicate between the people




(that is, a governor and a judge). While Luqman seemed at first to be the

most likely candidate, he knew that governing of necessity entailed the

likelihood of injustice. Such an early sign of remarkable wisdom spared

Luqman the agony of error-prone governance, a task that was assumed by

David instead.45 First of all, God intervenes in the world not directly but,

rather, by asking for assistance in adjudicating among the people on

earth. The contrast between Luqman and David illustrates a significant

point, namely, that governing and arbitrating justice are not necessarily

the same thing, that in fact, they may be contradictory tasks.

In Bedouin society, the chief of the tribe was little more than a judge-

like figure. This tradition apparently informs Luqman’s stance, which in

five steps expresses the inadequacy of a governing role for humans: First, adichotomy of opposites between judging and governing is established.

Second, Luqman the Wise, who is humble and close to earth, as opposed

to David, who is a prophet and close to God, notices that to be a judge in

the age of the activist God—and moreover to be able to do so because of

God’s power—means also to assume the still undesirable role of coercive

governor. Third, as a consequence, Luqman declines the judgeship not be-

cause it is needless but because it has become contaminated with the ne-

cessity of governing. He takes wisdom instead of either, and continues his

individual existence on the sidelines of the new state of affairs. Fourth,

David, who took up the divine offer, shows human failings in the task and

a propensity to sin. In the last step, when it is too late to rectify the dam-

age, David is reduced to envying Luqman’s happy freedom from the sin-

borne instruments concomitant with ruling.46

In this way, wisdom and knowledge are not only set apart from gover-

norship but are opposed to it in the terms of outcome. In one sense, thisstance expresses a resistance to the replacement of traditional regulatory

bonds through the introduction of political hierarchy. David necessarily

goes astray precisely because of the contradiction between the nature

of his role and the nature of the social life over which he is ruling. With

his infinite, legendary wisdom, Luqman wanders like any other ancient

Bedouin, free from ruling and being ruled, disdaining both situations. On

the other hand, David, as a God-sent and God-aided prophet, ceases wan-

dering and halts to dedicate at least one-third of his days to governing andadjudicating conflicts.47 Thus only God can change immemorial norms

regarding the idea of governing, especially when governing is posited as a




source of justice rather than as a pure exercise of power. But as soon as

God commences the project through David, an opposite, earthly charac-

ter makes his presence known, a character who is legitimated precisely by

having been asked to do the scornful task before the prophet was sum-

moned. Eventually, the faltering prophet comes to wish to trade places

with him. David’s weaknesses are thus exposed by virtue of his contrast to

an outcast, not through a direct confrontation with the society he is rul-

ing. Society itself is not directly challenging God’s decree and prophet.

Rather, it is a symbol on its periphery that effortlessly discredits the new

order and, without acrimony or rebellion, highlights the virtues of the

time-honored abstention from the stakes involved.

The selection of an ex-slave to reveal David’s shortcomings addressesan important contradiction. At one level, Luqman’s actual socioeconomic

position at the bottom of the social hierarchy is compensated for by his

unreachable spiritual status. Such a plot restores equality to a society that

had only recently begun to experience the phenomenon of stable, visible

political and economic hierarchies. It also points out that a less-stratified

past was still within the purview of a society, as it witnessed the construc-

tion of material and spiritual institutions for its reproduction as a differ-entiated entity. In this respect, David and Luqman can be regarded as

merely one set of a potential sphere of symbols,48 symbols that not only

stand for a transitional phase but also express an awareness of this fact

through the continued survival of a vantage point to the past.

In the mu‘allaqat, the relation to political hierarchies becomes more

prevalent the closer the poet is to sedentary or dynastic settings, and thus

closer to the Islamic era, to which the recorded Luqman shows at least

some exposure. An-Nabigha, for instance, while duly standing at the ruins

as he opens his ode, clearly shows no desire to mourn too much and is in

fact eager to depart shortly thereafter. After showing the perils of life in

the desert, the poet calls his she-camel out of its metaphorical hiding

place, whence the animal is instructed to take the poet home at once: “And

through her I am told of an-Nu‘man’s favors, / bestrewed as they are

among the near of the people, and the far” (c. 20). An-Nu‘man is the

source of this speaker’s wealth, including perhaps this she-camel, his well-being, his distance from nomadism. From an-Nu‘man’s court the poet

was expelled, and to that institution he endeavors to return on the strength




of an extended apology, whose delivery seems to motivate the very com-

position of an ode here.

The following line in the ode, thus, adds an equally empty praise for

the sovereign. Afterward, an-Nu‘man mercifully disappears, leaving the

scene for two extremely interesting metaphors, two legendary folk figures

who, much like Luqman, are extracted from circulating folk mythology:

Solomon and Zarqa’ l-Yamama. Yet unlike in the contrast between Luqman

and David, it is Solomon’s virtues that are illustrated through being con-

trasted to Zarqa’ l-Yamama, rather than his earthly shortcomings. The

sovereign, through his immediate presence, could solicit no more than an

obviously flat praise, and when he is addressed directly once more in the

ode—starting at couplet 32—he is clearly no more than a source of awealth to be apportioned among loyalists. By himself and without moral

support from historical and traditional metaphors, the sovereign has no

other virtues. His moral meaning must be found in and connected to the

parables of the past in which the duties of his office can be imagined. It is

interesting, therefore, that the poet constructs his metaphors at the mo-

ment when he seems to suspect a lack. The image of sovereignty is but-

tressed by symbolization. But the relative dearth of authenticity means

that it is the symbol that will assume a reality of its own upon usage.

Taken together, Solomon and Zarqa’ l-Yamama here illustrate the com-

bination of governance, wisdom, and knowledge, spheres that the Luqman-

David contrast had separated. In the ode of an-Nabigha, Solomon is ex-

plicitly introduced (c. 22 and after) in order to illustrate the unmatchable

(yet inexplicit) feats of an-Nu‘man. The transition is couched by the state-

ment that none among the living matches (in favor or in “doing”) the sov-

ereign, “except” for Solomon (thence commences Solomon’s story). Thisexception is, in essence, the whole story; it is the exemption of Solomon

from incomparability that allows the goodness of the existing sovereign

to appear to be universal. An impossibly broad virtue is demonstrated by

an extension of the tale of the existing sovereign to cover what is allowed

through exemption to reside outside of it. On the other hand—and this

is what allows this exemption itself, disarmed as it is of the flagrancy of

offense—the exception concerns an ancient figure of recognized sover-

eignty, whereby sovereignty is not seen (through the eyes of a Luqman, forinstance) as a potentially malevolent novelty but, instead, appears as a

“tradition” in the land, simply reawakened and invested in a new claimant.




This method of structuring discourse, it must be added, bears a strong re-

semblance to the early Qur’an, where “forgotten” traditions are awakened

and claimed to be the basis of the new faith. And as in the case of Islam,

since such traditions are assumed to be generally “known,” they furnish a

residual justification of the status quo (sovereignty and hierarchy in this

case) that the present has failed to complete on its own. Thus the story of

Solomon, hurriedly assembled under the pretext of telling of an “excep-

tionalism” (that is, complementarity), seeks at the same time to obviate

the profound moral void of meaning from which a present sovereignty

suffers, a void that could inadvertently be exposed by an unanchored,

general praise.

In a scene reminiscent of traditional poetic openings, Solomon, amajesty from times past, enters the ode standing in the face of the open

nature (barriyyah), commanded by God to cause it to desist from error

( fanad ). His first observation, however, is not of a ruined site of past har-

mony and togetherness but of an exactly opposite and future -oriented

activity: Solomon detects the first signs of permanent sedentarism in the

ongoing activity of the jinn who, by Allah’s leave, are busy building him a

city. Thereafter he receives rightly guided subjects (rightly guided being

both their virtue and their reward for having that virtue: the closed circuit

of virtue). Those subjects, in turn, are not equal. Solomon here is further

instructed that he has no need to curtail invectives (damad ) except toward

those who are “equal” to him or “slightly” inferior (c. 26); thus the notion

of an “elite” and special subject, to whom regular rules do not apply, and

whose relation to the sovereign is to remain, therefore, more structured

by favors than by abstract ethical strictures.

These highlights are all that is told of Solomon’s state. A state here isviewed as a stable order of domination, with vague (a weak deity’s instruc-

tion) or inexpressible ground of normativity. The need of such an order of

governance for obedience confronts all subjects with the choice of either

accepting or refusing. Negotiating a third way is allowed only to those

“equal” or “slightly” inferior to the sovereign himself. That is all that this

nomad could say about the state.Yet in the history of the nomad, that was

indeed a novel proposition. Suddenly there was an external political entity

standing there and demanding that the wanderer halt long enough to givean answer to the question of the nature of the wanderer’s relation to it—

a relationship that was now to have more meaning than being a sheer




accident of inhabiting its jurisdiction. Such an answer was essential for the

state’s conduct of its business. The answerability was fundamental, for it

was to show Solomon how to undertake the task with which he alone was

entrusted. God had delivered a general commandment and then quickly

vanished, as was his habit in those amorphous pre-Islamic times. He had

made a simple designation, delivered an impossibly general instruction,

and personified its act of interpretation, and he had said no more.All sub-

sequent decipherments of the divine message were left for Solomon to

ponder. So Solomon constructed his knowledge here according to the

hints, models, and parallels he was allowed to discern. God had instructed

him to ban evil in this God-forsaken country and, while withdrawing, had

left a little instrumental hint: The city and its builders were all Solomon’s.So Solomon had an army, a city, a divine commandment, and a re-

sponsibility to interpret it. The interlocution of the last two items, espe-

cially, anticipates a movement beyond the city, for the city itself is intro-

duced neither for its own sake nor as a self-contained locus of authority,

but as the condition of actualizing the statement. The divine command

applies not only to the city, where it first begins to be put into effect, but

also to the vast nature outside—the barriyyah, to which it is contrasted

and upon which it finds itself sprouting like a wild flower carving for itself

a lonesome way of being. And it seems to itself, as it stands out, that to be

a city means to uninterruptedly observe the barriyyah outside, that im-

posing silence of the noncity, congesting the distance from that point to

the horizons in all directions.

Solomon’s knowledge is possible because he can be trusted to interpret

the founding statement of the city. The holder of such a trust is, in turn, a

ruler of the city, in essence, its only possible ruler. His capacity to inter-pret, which the tradition elsewhere invests in Luqman, is thus indistin-

guishable from his capacity to demonstrate the interpreted knowledge,

which elsewhere was David’s domain of operation. But since life in the

city, unlike the badawah lifestyle, cannot be based on a sequence of dis-

crete and nonadditive moments, Solomon must continually demonstrate

the interpretation. This, in turn, requires the validation of the statement

through action. The originality of this modus operandi can best be appre-

ciated if one compares it to similarly expansive projects at governancewithin nomadism proper, such as in the case of Kinda. The fundamentally

fleeting, intermittent nature of such governance is evident throughout




nomadic societies down to modern times.49 By contrast, the model of-

fered here, half sedentary and half mythological, is based on continual re-

generation of legitimate outcome as the condition of stability of an origi-

nal, founding statement or principle. Such a structure for knowledge is

the basis of authority, and conversely, authority is its basis.

We see here, then, the emergence of a protected reciprocity between a

generally expressed statement and an interpretive capacity of sovereign

authority. The reciprocity is also guarded through the simple duality of

reward and punishment, which seems to suffice for a while. A general no-

tion of ethics to ontologize the sovereign beyond such a duality was a site

of much contention, of which our poet here seems to know little. Such an

ethic was to be a later addition, with basis and models in versions of theidea of prophethood, legitimate succession, and exegesis of holy words. It

had to wait until that nomad could halt long enough to construct from

the certainty of the state, the irremovability of this imposing transtribal

order of abstract sovereignty, a certain notion of ethics. At its point of

origination, the city itself knows about itself little more than an associa-

tion of postsubsistence abundance with residence.

The absence of an elaborate notion of ethics notwithstanding, there is

a certain virtue of right-guidedness (c. 24: rushd ), which is equally inelabo-

rate and unclassified. It is Solomon’s responsibility to assure its exercise.

Yet to be expounded in coded forms, it constitutes nonetheless an objec-

tive of a recent state. Ethical normativity in the realm of the state is here

defined by the sovereign for the benefit of the contending, obedient sub-

ject. Naturally, one should not expect the narrator, himself accustomed to

the sedentary state as more of a source of bestowals than of ethical codes,

to know more, or to provide more, or even to be willing to talk of thisstrange topic. Yet there was another item of state that he must have no-

ticed clearly: that states are always engaged in violence, that they fight

other states, that their wars—his own patrons themselves waging wars as

clients of imperial states—could be very large compared to the customary

nomadic raids, and that, occasionally, the ruler must lay more modest

claims toward a sovereign who is or who is suspected to be an equal than

toward his subjects, who by nature must obey.

The last couplet in the Solomon sequence registers this fact of state af-fairs, not a happy note to the mentor, a bit mischievous, but nonetheless

more known to the poet than the details of the normative code, which




were yet to be laid down, standardized, or deciphered. This poet, standing

at the beginning of history, could discern a crude and naked power game.

His decision to confront the problematic with cynicism comes out glar-

ingly in couplets 32 to 36: successive, fragmentary, disconnected images of

wealth, the easy life, and all the potential offerings to a loyal subject by the

state. That is all that the state means to him. Yet his is the kind of decision

that, unlike a puritan attitude, could take note of a discontinuity between

the “original intention” behind the state (for example, God’s statement)

and what emerges at a later stage as consequences to the self from the

state’s coming into being. A commandment to intervene in the world in

order to stop the potential malevolence of untamed nature ushers in a struc-

ture of power, which could act only under the dictates of self-preservation.There is no necessary continuity between the two sets of concerns, and it

is this middle region of doubt between the two at which the cynical option

offers itself as a response modality for those unprepared to endure the

rigor of the wilderness outside.

The other set of images through which the image of sovereignty is con-

solidated in an-Nabigha’s ode concerns the legendary Zarqa’ l-Yamama,

fabled for a miraculous power of sight. She could see, so the legend goes,

for a distance of several days. There is a short interval between Solomon’s

story and hers, an interval that an-Nabigha uses to remind the audience

that he is still addressing the existing sovereign (c. 27: “. . . and rule like the

girl of the clan . . .”). Thus, what follows is to continue the instruction

on the rules of ruling, adding what Solomon did not provide, perhaps an-

other “exception.” The sagaciousness of Zarqa’ infuses the idea of “ruling”

with a possibility of knowing the future. To see in the distance is also tosee through time, to see who or what is coming toward the observer. The

future is a spatial dimension, for the nomad has no purely temporal sense

of time: Time is simply that which is required to cross a distance. It has no

independent self-confirmation. The future is thus known simply by look-

ing. To have a powerful, discerning eye is thus an essential ground for a

claim to knowledge. And thus the myth of Zarqa’ l-Yamama epitomizes

the possibility of knowing that which time shall in its own course reveal.

The common, ordinary kinfolk (hayy ) are the ones who shall live to con-firm the truthfulness of her prediction, and their confirmation, in turn,

becomes the ground of the authenticity of her vision.




On the other hand, in the age of the visionary, secure knowledge could

reside beyond simple immediacy: It could now be the property of those

who are naturally more endowed with a power to discern a truth that

shall become. This becomes, then, one of the forms of knowledge that the

state is expected by definition to possess: to be able to see from above, to be

capable of forewarning and of being forewarned as well. The inexplicable

sagaciousness of the state lavishes a spiritual aura upon its hitherto naked

presence as power. Its phenomenal certainty consists no longer of the

menacing, detached presence of a sovereign, city, or army. Just as is God’s

statement, this knowledge is also entrusted to the sovereign. The state,

therefore, becomes a form of certainty predicated upon the dual aspect of

knowing: interpreting the already delivered statement of the hidden sov-ereign (God) and delivering a new statement on the otherwise hidden

knowledge by the existing sovereign. In other words, the meaning of the

state consists in bringing into presence that which must otherwise remain

nonimmediate and that, if it so remains, would be destined to perish on

account of its uncertainty, undecidability, and uselessness.

It is to this towering structure that our an-Nabigha finally comes to ask

forgiveness and seek readmittance. He is fearful of the natural world out-

side. The poet of the city is accustomed only to an approving audience

and its possible generosity. Once that home is taken away, he discovers

that the loss of the fluidity of nomadic lack of concern for regularities of

sedentary structures and hierarchies is irreversible. Sedentarism itself

is also irreversible. Such a state of affairs heralds some major aspects

of post-Islamic poetry to come: precisely topical; less encyclopedic; more

attentive to conflicting, constricting, and solicitous institutions of power

and counterpower. In this particular case, the dilemma is clearly spelledout in what immediately follows the image of a windswept Euphrates in

which the navigator must continue to hold on to the shipwreck, despite a

corrosive exhaustion, lest he collapse into the river:

A better day, when the bestowals flow:

may today’s giving not forbid tomorrow’s. (c. 46)

The giving, thus,assumes the same nature of the antecedent nomadic path:

not a one-time experience but a continually renewable tradition, a newway of life paralleling the same continuity the path had once promised.

This city is continually contrasted to the stormy nature of outsidedness,no




longer to be desired. Nothing, in fact, outside of the city is desired any

longer: At the very end of the ode, the poet throws it at the gate as a price

for entrance:

Such is my atonement; may it find a course,for its composer has gone astray in the country. (c. 50)

By contrast, Luqman, while rejecting the role of governing and retaining

his distance from city gates, expresses his wisdom through a more morally

established and universal channel of authority. The bulk of Luqman’s

wisdom is preserved in the form of advices and instructions given to his

son (in a manner remarkably reminiscent of the Old Testament’s Book of

Proverbs). The communication is unidirectional, as the opinions, ques-tions, and responses of the son are never mentioned. This style was in

harmony with a tradition that deposited the most normative hierarchy in

the father-son relationship rather than in the sovereign-subject channel,

which was more visible to a poet like an-Nabigha. The parental line of-

fered an enormously valuable channel for transmitting ideals, old and new,

since coercion was neither required nor expected—a rather profound con-

cern for a society lacking in a centralized means of coercion.

Luqman imparts many truths to his son, truths encompassing ethics

and the nature of things. Those aspects of Luqman’s transmitted wisdom

preserved in the tradition are significant not because of their “authenticity”

but because they tell us a great deal more about the Islamic paradigm

(and its earlier roots in some aspects of pre-Islamic culture) within which

they were compiled than about any actual historical figure. Thus, one

might find it interesting that the father, the hitherto uncontested source of

control, himself broadens the potential domain of social forces capableof directing and conditioning the behavior of the son: “Son, attend [the

councils of] the wise men and strive for a place [in them]. Do not argue

with them so that they would not deprive you of their sayings, ease the

question on them if they allow you [to ask], and do not complicate

[things] so that they would not be burdened by you.”50 Such a vague

council of the wise ones was to find a concrete expression in, among other

places, the sedentary hierarchy. Although the merchants who controlled

pre-Islamic Mecca did not precisely conform to the esteemed ideals ex-pressed by Luqman, his teachings did at least point the way to a nascent

social hierarchy whose features might not have been predictable but




which was certain to include more than just the father. The most prosper-

ous Meccan traders, for instance, could, by assigning to themselves specific

haram service obligations, occupy a position within a spiritual hierarchy

as well, which was recognized by Qurayshans from various lines of descent.

Luqman’s concept of hierarchy, however, was far from being specific on

details, conditions, or instances. The only criterion for the validity of a

hierarchy here consists of it being a depository of “knowledge,” whose

acquisition is stressed by the father without qualification; the son has to

fight for a place in the councils of the more knowledgeable men, since it is

a virtue in itself to be with them; and then he will only be a listener rather

than a full participant in the manner of the Bedouin tribal councils. Thus

Luqman signifies, among other things, a transformation of the practice of hierarchy, whereby the “son” has to make a continuous effort not to bur-

den authority by his very presence. He has to find a way to incorporate

himself into a certain type of social hierarchy, which he could expect to

demand proof of grateful submission.

The addition of the wise men, as an intellectual foundation, to the le-

gitimate chain of control is augmented by an instruction on the virtues of

submission to political power as well: “Son, if you sat down with a man of

power, let there be between you and him a man’s sitting space, so that you

would not be belittled and humiliated by him asking you to give up your

place for a visitor who is more valued by him than you are.”51 As he sur-

renders in the face of knowledge, the son must now show a similar respect

to power. Whereas the men of knowledge are beyond reach and could not

in any case be burdened, the men of power could in principle be reached,

but the son is advised to keep his distance. For the harm they can do,

which defines them as men of power in the first place, stems not so muchfrom their crude prowess as from their ability to value.

The ability to value is no longer seen to be rooted in an arbitrary will,

which, because arbitrary, could be disregarded. Rather, it is the property

of a power that is capable of detecting an actual value in nature and then

displaying it in view of all with eyes to see. The council giving audience to

this power must believe the truthfulness of this value judgment, since it is

the raison d’être of power to discover value and to present it as unques-

tionable. The distance of this attitude from the Bedouin ethical realm canbest be comprehended by contrasting it with some of the values permeat-

ing the ode of ‘Amru Ibn Kalthum. Though himself a man of power,




‘Amru’s fiery speech seethes with indignation at the ill-advised attempt by

an ostensible superior to impose a less-than-equal status on ‘Amru’s tribe.

The legend, in fact, asserts that the poet produced his ode immediately

after having slain the said adversary in his outrage.

While expanding on the sources of social control, Luqman does not for-

get to accentuate his own position, emphasizing the need to please and

obey one’s parents, which was an aspect of Luqman’s wisdom that the

Qur’an clearly registered and approved.52 Right in the midst of a dense peda-

gogy, the father reasserts his own right to continue to deliver it, but not be-

cause of any normative expectation of obedience to the father. The source

of Luqman’s own authority now is God, the ostensible source of his wis-

dom, which in this case becomes the outcome of his wisdom as well. That isto say, since the pedagogy that the son is being exposed to is recognized to

be fundamentally beyond the norms of the tradition, the traditional in-

structor can no longer instruct solely in his traditional capacity as a father.

After all of this intensive, mystified hierarchy places its weight upon the

son, he becomes prepared to swallow the grand conceptions of life and

world that will follow. The centerpiece of the new worldview is the dichoto-

my of life and afterlife. Luqman himself had declined the caliphate for fear

that it entailed a potential loss of favor in this world or the other.53 That is,

he recognized that potential sin was associated with governing, as well as

with all material yearnings. Doing harm to others through governing them,

invariably becoming unjust in the process, and having to restrict their origi-

nal freedoms, are plainly constructed as social sources of sin. But it is sig-

nificant that the concept of sin operates in the exact opposite order when it

comes to individual life: Here, one must place one’s own individual world

under strict control so as to avoid falling into sin. Mere entanglement withearthly enjoyments of life leads only to illusions and potential losses after-

ward: “Son, attend funerals and not weddings, for funerals remind you of

the other world while weddings awaken your desire in this world.”54 The

Qur’an clearly endorses such teachings, highlighting Luqman’s instructions

to his son to bear misfortune with fortitude, to be humble, to lower his

voice, and to walk upon the earth without showing excessive, undue pride.55

Though loathsome, the quest to survive the mortal conditions of life is

portrayed as leading people to endure the pain of authority, hierarchy,valuation by power, and the new forms of self-control for the moment.

The futility of those schemes is illustrated in two simple steps: First, it is




argued that all humans seek immortality. Then, a myriad of mythico-

historical records are marshaled to prove the impossibility of attaining

such a dear aspiration. Immortality, thus, is possible only as a gift from an

exterior, invisible, and extraordinarily powerful source. The Bedouin son

is presented with a problem, which he had probably never thought of as

such before, only to be made aware of his own weakness and need for help

in order to overcome it. This idea is sometimes emphasized by presenting

Luqman himself as an example. When Allah offered him anything he

wanted, with the exception of immortality, Luqman chose longevity, the

closest possible alternative. Allah then gave him the age of seven eagles.

Luqman attempted the impossible, trying to outlast this time limit; he

chose the strongest eagles at their hatching and associated one of the sevengiven lives with each. Ending with the seventh, he chose the strongest

eagle he could find on earth, to whom he gave the name Labad (eternity).

But Labad eventually died, and so did Luqman.56

In this parable the deity is introduced neither as a sporadic entity nor

as a strictly transcendental entity but, rather, as a source of action on daily

concerns and operations in which harm and help are possible and fre-

quently encountered. Luqman’s passive philosophy avoided the harmful

aspect of God, leaving that task to Islam at a later stage; Luqman’s God

could only reward, and then not with respect to one’s earthly work but

only in a possible, misty world beyond. Here, a divine figure of immense

power makes its presence more frequent in a materialist society with little

concern for the otherworld. The materialist conception of the world so

abundantly encountered in Bedouin thought, wisdom, and poetry rejected

the idea of resurrection or, at best, conceived of it as a pseudonym for a

questionable search after immortality. To appreciate either concept in tran-scendental terms, they had to accept the idea that such concepts were not

invalid just because human effort was inadequate to attain them. Because

such concepts were valued despite their transcendence of human limita-

tions, a provision was made for divine work. Thereby, God’s work consist-

ed not only in the production of the promise but, moreover, in furnishing

further evidence of human incapacities, the increasing awareness of which

had allowed for God’s introduction in the first place.

Luqman’s wisdom is not confined to the questions addressed here, as it

also covers—through sayings and parables—issues of everyday manners




and ethics. In a sense, it may be compared to the codes of ethics encoun-

tered in the odes, especially Zuhair’s. It represents yet another significant

source of common ethics, referenced to a transtribally relevant, distant,

but familiar and earthly author. This structure partially anticipates grand

organizing principles and partially retains and inflates a preexisting but

vague idea of God. Thus, though Luqman was one of the more nomadic

sources of inspiration for Islam, he remained much more limited in scope

than what was being called for by the dictates of sedentarism, a trade

economy, and the fragility of the encompassing order in Muhammad’s

era. For a while, at least, and in certain quarters, these scattered fragments

of variably effective instructions for individual life seemed to suffice. A re-

ported encounter between Muhammad and a prospective convert hints atthe perceived nature of the relationship between the two sets of doctrines,

obviously regarded by Muhammad in evolutionary terms. The man won-

dered whether Muhammad’s doctrines resembled the doctrines to which

he himself subscribed, which in the process were revealed as consisting of

Luqman’s sayings. Thereupon, Muhammad commented:“Those are good

sayings, but what I have is better. It is a Qur’an revealed to me by God

almighty.”57




‘Ilm al-Kalam, or scholasticism (literarily, “the science of speech”) was

one of the most foundational components of early Islamic philosophy, as

it began to take form a little less than a century after the death of the

prophet.1 The centrality of language analysis to many Islamic systems of

thought is one of the most striking historical features of the intellectual

offshoots of the faith. A leading commentator has expressed bewilder-

ment, in the context of contemporary debates in literary theory, at how

little is known of the fact that many of the contours of the lines of

thought regarding language and representation under discussion today can already be discerned in debates surrounding Qur’anic exegesis some

ten centuries ago.2

There is little question that the relationship between language, repre-

sentation, and truth has been a central and recurrent feature of Islamic

civilization since its inception.A common argument—which for Muslims

became one ground for the miraculous nature of the revelation—was that

the literary plain through which the Qur’an expressed itself emanated

from a temporal context prefigured by the experience of poetry, whichthen highlighted the idea of the form of speaking as a venue of truth. For

Muslims, the literary superiority of the Qur’an to the odes itself proved its

115

f ive

The Discourse and the Path

Do you not see how God compares a good word to a good tree? Its roots are

firm and its branches are in the sky.

—Qur’an 14: 26



unmatchability by human means (i‘jaz ). In other words, for the Arabs to

whom Islam was first disclosed, the field of language was itself the field of

the miracle, in the same way that, as some classical commentators have

noted, medicine was the field of the miracle in the age of Jesus, who had

to prove his credentials by miraculous healing, or magic was in the age

of Moses, who likewise had to prove his credentials through that venue

of truth production.3 In one of the few contemporary studies to revisit

such a notion of discursive centrality to Islamic thought, Nasr Hamed

Abu Zaid seems to endorse this same ancient point of view by asserting

that the Islamic civilization can be regarded primarily as a “civilization of

the text.”4

In some classical as well as much of contemporary orientalist scholar-ship, examining a language-oriented civilizational frame has entailed fol-

lowing a rather narrow path of meticulous but largely inert philological

deductions, in a way that obscured the philosophical and sociohistorical

complexities surrounding discourse production. With rare exceptions,

the field has remained largely closed to the contemporary advances in the

philosophy and cultural studies of discourse production that have bene-

fited so many other fields of inquiry. There are a few exceptions, such asMohammed Arkoun, who argues for a multilevel approach to the Qur’an,

more richly embedded in contemporary philosophical and anthropologi-

cal debates. The three approaches selected by Arkoun for illustration in-

clude a linguistic one, where emphasis is placed on detecting deep, orderly

structures; an anthropological approach, which would be oriented toward

a different level of structure, namely, the mythological one; and a histori-

cal approach, which would be oriented toward and advised by the philoso-

phy of history as it pertains to this field, already referenced by the tradi-

tional genre of asbab an-nuzul (grounds of Revelation).5

The examination of the full scope of this langauge-oriented focus

within Islamic culture and philosophy is well beyond the limited scope of

this chapter. Rather, the emphasis here will be confined to the founda-

tional period, and more specifically I will focus on some important trans-

formations in representation between jahili (pre-Islamic) and Qur’anic

forms, especially in the context of the odes. The exposition cannot, need-less to say, be exhaustive, but I hope that it will illustrate some major ideo-

logical and expressive attitudes toward being, representation, and the

116 • The Discourse and the Path



recording of items of value, particuarly as they relate to sociological shifts

in lifestyle and mentalities.

forms, codes, words

In both the Qur’an and poetic speech, the form of expression assumes

paramount importance, since it first indicates the classification of the

speech. It was after that primary classification that the “substance” of the

speech could then be introduced. It is such a form that, for instance, al-

lows an ode like that of al-Harith to be counted among the great odes. If

the traditional opening (c. 1–14) were removed from the body of the

poem, for instance, al-Harith’s production would appear to be a rhymedpolitical speech (khutba musajja‘ah) rather than a poem with some level

of autonomy from the immediate concerns of a mortal society. Apart

from the opening, everything else in the piece has a clear political charac-

ter, refers to particular events, clarifies the position of the tribe in each

case, and appeals to the wise judgment of the king of al-Hira, in whose

court the ode is said to have been delivered. Except for the traditional

opening, all else has an instrumental communicative purpose and is de-

livered to an audience that is expected to act upon this delivered knowl-

edge, on behalf of another audience that is to be redressed by its effects.

Such is not, needless to say, necessarily a “misuse” of or a “betrayal” to an

eloquent form of discourse. (After all, al-Harith’s mission was to rescue

his tribe from the erratic whims of a dangerous king.) Given the stakes in-

volved, there follows the temptation to protect the story and point of view

of the tribe with the relative security of a highly regarded form, and in

some cases, such as this one, to adhere to such a form in an excessively orthodox fashion. Two observations follow in this regard.

1. By the time of al-Harith, poetry had already been granted a superior ca-

pacity to render truthful accounts, natural orders, and stable conditions,

to an authority or an audience. In other words, a distinct discourse was el-

evated from being a deviant act warranting expulsion from the tribe into

a result-oriented, solid fountain for sociopolitical communication, ideals,

and ideas.2. That tradition, in turn, was founded upon a formal discursive stability.

The opening of the speech became the location at which the specific type

The Discourse and the Path • 117



of discourse was determined. In other words, the opening formula directly

defined the nature of the piece to follow, hinted at its reference point in

terms of tribal politics, served to adjust listening faculties to a diversity

of possible themes, and also established the credentials of the work as an-

other component of an emerging “canon.” The typification of speaking

was determined in terms of how it began rather than in terms of how the

speech unfolded, its substantive themes, or how it tied such themes to-

gether. The ending in all of the mu‘allaqat (odes) is unimportant, incon-

clusive, a mere continuation of the theme that happened to be circulating

at that point of poetic flight. It was usually a moment of sudden, unex-

pected landing. The poem itself did not attempt to tie its themes together.

Thus, the only point at which a determination as to the collective natureof the speech could occur was at the beginning. What was important,

however, was what followed the opening: Once the speech was classified

as such, the audience gathered itself to hear that which had been designat-

ed as poetry. After the classification of the speech as poetry, the audience

became absorbed in a different dimension, launched by a pronouncement

for, of, or about halting with which the ode invariably began. Thus, what

seems to us to be enormous disjunctions within each ode could seem to

be perfectly smooth terrain when heard under the tutelage of a different

aura of listening. The smoothness of such a terrain is determined not by

a continuity of empirical experience but by a primal act of “standing.” It

was at the moment of halting that all determinations of the general nature

of the path to follow were made.

The Qur’anic surah (chapter) also exhibits an obsession with indicative

form. The challenge for the Qur’an was to find an appropriate form, onethat would indicate divine as opposed to poetic speech. The resort to saja‘

(rhymed speech) in the Qur’an of early Mecca partially accomplished that

distinction. But saja‘ itself had already been in circulation as a form long

before Muhammad; it generally distinguished the kahin (soothsayer),

who had jurisdiction over mysticism, prophesying, and sagehood, from

the poet. As will be discussed in Chapter 7, many Qurayshans also

thought that Muhammad could be described to the Arab pilgrims in

Mecca as either a kahin or a magician—and less convincingly as a poet—exclusively on the grounds of the nature of his sayings. A leading com-

mentator argues that since it was generally accepted that saja‘ and poetry




poets became possible simply because of this dense air of words sur-

rounding them, so many words competing with each other for the privi-

lege of designating the same object.

Thus the ease of the flow of poetry was supplied from an inexhaustible

reservoir of words. Between the poet and the object, there stood a con-

gested traffic of words, each carving for itself a territory from the life of

the object. The limitless supply of words could thus destructure all totali-

ties in the world to their smallest constitutent components and isolate

their most specific manners of movement, stability, or relation. It was a

condition of life in which words, as products of the conditions of wander-

ing, were so unleashed as to form layers of signs upon all externalities, and

even upon each other. As such, they confirmed their power to bring exter-nalities closer to consciousness and claim them in the words, while at the

same time infusing empowerment projects with the vigor of this lan-

guage. That was the lesson that was soon to be fully appreciated by textual

Islamic religion, as it firmly grounded itself upon a second order of sys-

tematic assemblage beyond the ode, namely, that of the “book.”

It is in this light that the book can be understood, namely, as a second

order of abstraction, when linguistic forms are made into codes, when

such codes are referenced with respect to an authority beyond the world

itself, and when, in a tautological fashion, such an authority is premised

again on the claimed uniqueness of the linguistic form by which it is ex-

pressed. In this regard, one can suggest that whereas the Meccan Qur’an

was infused with formulaic structures that served largely indicative func-

tions, the Medinian Qur’an displayed a transition into a language of codi-

fications, which served as grounds for advising action in the world.

First, the importance of organizing words as indicative, primary signsis incorporated into the story of creation, where Adam’s first task in

heaven is to prove his knowledge to suspicious—and hitherto ignorant—

angels by telling them the names of all things, as taught to him by Allah.

This vast knowledge that Adam acquires and transmits anchors the entire

project of book-oriented codification and encompasses the entirety of life

and nature (“[And] He taught Adam the names of all things and set them

before the angels, saying: ‘Tell me the names of these.’”).7 Thus, the cre-

dentials of the encyclopedic project of codification and interconnectedsignification are premised first and foremost on the singularity of the

source of their names, which allows them to be discerned as distinct ob-




jects. At another level, the project of the book is also premised on the

impossibility of its accomplishment by existing frames of knowledge,

demonstrated by the ignorance of the angels (whose existence, in a paral-

lel fashion, predates Adam’s).

Words, though connected to knowledge retrieval in the fashion indi-

cated above, also serve in this context to differentiate human and divine

knowledge. The mystical, uninterpretable sequence of letters commenc-

ing some surahs, though relatively few, were objects of a disproportionate

effort at decipherment and were obviously seen as encapsulating an un-

imaginable amount of knowledge in single, scattered utterances. Signifi-

cantly, Muhammad himself made little effort to bring forth their mean-

ing, since they were seen to offer only a glimpse of a higher and humanly unreachable form of relations between language and signifieds. The

prophet was thus strangely silent on reported numerological interpreta-

tions by some Jews of such letter sequences, which for them signified the

number of years that Islam would predominate.8

Regardless of the specificity, historicity, and impact of floating interpre-

tations, the most significant aspect of such words was the prophetic and

divine silence surrounding their possible referent in the world, or beyond.

It was a silence that confirmed the connection between the word and the

knowledge presumed to hide within it, yet in exactly the opposite manner

in which Adam’s recitation of names disclosed the nature of the world as

being made up of distinct objects and, hence, distinct missions. With the

mystical sequence of letters, a code locks in a congested site an incompre-

hensible cosmic order or an eternal sequence of events. And in doing so,

this impenetrable code conceals an unknown magnitude of knowledge in

an indeterminate realm. The parceling out of knowledge, furthermore,occurs not by pure assertion of divine wisdom or prerogative—as it is ex-

plicitly justified elsewhere in the Qur’an—but by a linguistic formula:

Language itself “proves”knowledge as well as its impossibility.

nature, text, rui ns

In the poetic tradition, the aura of a textlike production was primarily

oriented toward preestablished rather than revelatory knowledge and wasattentive to the model of nature rather than to that of transformative

human labor. In the eloquent opening of Labid’s ode, the poet ponders




the enigma of “text” as a metaphor for preservation, as he meditates upon

the meaning of the ruins:

. . . and the torrent-beds of Er-Raiyán—naked shows their trace,

rubbed smooth, like letterings long since scored on a stony slab. (c. 2)

. . . Then the torrents washed the dusty ruins, until they seem

like scrolls of writing whose text their pens have revivified. (c. 8)

Labid’s extended halting allows him to carefully observe and record the

workings of nature. Here, nature speaks, nature acts, nature washes away a

previous “text” from its pages and writes a new one in its place. Does the

poet realize that his own ode is itself a text? What is the nature of this

“authorship” that delivers him to us as a distinctive personality? What of

preserving an otherwise amorphous presence through textual deposition?

In the second couplet, a “text” is given as a trace, almost a near shadow,

but as the only preservable mark nonetheless. One has to come near to be

able to read it. But the contents (mutun) of texts themselves seem to be

unimportant. They could wash away, vanish, or be reinvented (tujaddad )

or rewritten. So there are two things that persist: the creator of the text

(composer, nature, or the text’s own power to self-generate: “by theirpens” [aqlamuha ]), and the form of textual presence. And so is the ode: It

is a form of speech, new to the historical scene, coming together with a

clearly recognizable, highly esteemed author. Once uttered, it echoes end-

lessly through the desert. It functions like a trace, that is, like that frag-

ment from a past state of totality that had enabled the poet, after all those

years (c. 3: “many years have passed over, months unhallowed and sacro-

sanct”) to recognize (“like letterings”) the lodging place of past lovers.

Nature erases; nature preserves. Furthermore, nature erases and pre-

serves what it wills. Since there is no perceptible order that enables the ob-

server to predict what will last, the observer ascribes that power of willing

to nature. Why a scroll of writing on a stone is preserved while the lodging

of the lover is not—even though both belong to the same semantic unity

of a place’s name—is an opposition that can only be understood as a

blind, formidable will of nature. Now the poet, anxious to preserve (him-

self, his memory, a past project at identity, and so on) emulates nature: Heproduces a preservable discourse. What is inscribed on stone, after all, is a

record of loss preserved through a primal act of willing the record itself.




The content of such a record—which is scarcely mentioned—is insignifi-

cant to our poet, to all poets, to anyone who happens to pass by. The

willer had long disappeared, perished, wandered off, wandered away. In

the desert, the passerby would not recognize the original willer but would

be more likely to be struck by the power to survive of the willer’s speech.

Thus a continually revivifiable text came to be seen as a frame of reference

for halting in general rather than as a signifier of an implied or expressed

purpose, code, wisdom, or content.

This mode of preservation through textual recording, while emulating

nature’s observed mode of preservation, also acts in a reciprocal fashion

to discern how nature’s mode is reflected in human signs. Immediately

following the reference to textual revivification, Labid’s ode adds anothertwist to the metaphor, where reclamation by nature is seen to resemble

the revelation of the tattooing on a woman’s hand. This recalls very simi-

lar images by composers of other odes:

There are traces yet of Khaula in the stony tract of Thahmad

apparent like the tattoo-marks seen on the back of a hand. (Tarafa, c. 1)

A lodging where the abode in Er-Rakmatán, that appears

like criss-cross tattooings upon the sinews of a wrist. (Zuhair, c. 2)

Thus, what we have here is an apparently widely diffused image, an image

that must have been captivating. The poets here are fully aware that the

two items being brought together belong to two distinct spheres of exis-

tence, that the object to be described is so impoverished in and of itself as

to require an external support, that it is barren and yet must continue to

be addressed.

The various interpretive possibilities suggested by this metaphor seem

to all point to nature as the model for preservative and creative activity. To

liken nature’s reclamation of a former abode to fading bodily decoration

could be premised on the discovery that the creative subject operates

upon the world “like” nature does. Rather than being posited as an anti-

human externality, nature is seen to be acting in a mode that parallels

human transformative efforts. A different interpretive possibility could be

that the poets lament the very idea of change rather than the abortion of apromised teleological march, the deconstruction of a totalizable identity,

the distance between memory and the present, or the triumph of disorder




over order. Thus, the ordeal of a transformative project with lustrous,

decorative intent is as much lamented as the transformation of a promise

of perfection into rubble. The common element in both operations, again,

is the success of an impenetrable, unconquerable, unstructurable, unpre-

dictable, exterior will and the subsequent definition of will as an external

power over the self.

In any case, the metaphor entails a clear recognition of symmetry.

Though not directly related, both material construction (the abode) and

aesthetic appendage (the appearance of the self) are equally subject to

erosion over time. Both occupy the same lamentable plane for the poet,

who knows that even though he must learn from the model of nature, na-

ture itself will always be one step ahead of him. Unlike nature, he mustact, create, change, defend, make decisions, and above all, will consciously.

Nature, on the other hand, seems to will, and to transform by the magic

of its will, effortlessly, anonymously, subjectlessly, speechlessly: The only

thing it leaves intact, it seems, is a willed speech. And hence the poetic dis-

course itself: responding to nature in kind, with the only weapon time

seems to be unwilling to erase. With this weapon, however, one does not

confront nature. Rather, one accepts nature’s terms of destiny. One pre-

serves and wills and creates with the only capacity nature allows one to

keep beyond the self, namely, the capacity to speak, to preserve, to will, and

to create through speech. Only through speech, thus, could such an obser-

vor become like nature.

The paradigmatic shift observed in Qur’anic speech, as opposed to the

ode, is first and foremost indicated by the derisive tone with which the

Qur’an addresses the ruins. For the sedentaries, among whom the Qur’an

appeared and to whom it spoke, the nomadic horizon and the ideationalimperative of the ruins had become distant memories, even though they

continued to inform a formulaic poetic tradition. Qur’anic speech, rather

than being oriented toward preservation, following the model of a norma-

tive and overpowering nature, is oriented toward the retrieval of a spatio-

temporally distant (transcendental and historical) truth. Nature here is

no longer the model but only one of the symptoms of such a truth. When

the work of nature ceases to be the reference point of knowledge, it is no

longer seen to belong to the essence of nature itself; rather, it appears as just another manifestation of the spatiotemporally detached truth. This

was no more apparent than in the idea of the ruins, which in the Qur’an




was reoriented away from its paradigmatic hold over the nomadic ode.

There were two basic reorientations in that regard:

1. For the Qur’an, as opposed to the ode, ruins are metaphorical rather

than geographically specifiable reference points. They are scarcely usedto open the speech itself, let alone anchor it. As such, ruins signify

through this usage a further departure from the model of ideationally

formative nature and of nature as an empirically verifiable container of

the limits of experience.

2. Ruins in the Qur’an, furthermore, are not the result of normal cycles

of human departure, as they are in the ode. Seen from a sedentary per-

spective, ruins are an indication of social malfunction. As such, they usually appear in the Qur’an as evidence of sin, and consequently they

result from divine displeasure.9 With the advent of sedentarism, ruins

lose their normativity and begin to require an ethical explanation for

their deviation from the model of successful settlement.

The abandonment of the ruins in this fashion was not entirely abrupt,

however. Some nomadic poets—albeit following different motivations—

had themselves registered an awareness of the confined figural space of the ruins but had found little to replace them with. This is evident in the

ode of the legendary warrior-poet-lover ‘Antara; the ode opens with

otherwise traditional and dutifully presented motifs: highly praised ruins

(c. 5); naming and localizing (c. 4, 9); contextualizing within an inhos-

pitable realm (c. 6–7); direct speech to the ruins (c. 2, 5); halting for the

explicit purpose of mourning the unattainable (c. 3). But then there is the

strange, discontinued protest of the ode’s very first verse: “Have the poets

left a single spot for a patch to be sewn? [Hal ghadara ash-shu‘ara‘a min

mutaraddimi? ].” Is there still any image, idea, gesture, or other intensities

of the experience of the ruins not yet claimed in one poem or another?

Could this body of poetics still be added to? Has the archive been com-

pleted? Yet the very next half of the couplet abruptly aborts the question-

ing, making the swift decision to drop the enigma for the comfort of the

tradition: “Or did you recognize the abode after long meditation?”

Another questioning, yet of a thoroughly secure nature.The first question of the ode itself reveals that it belongs to a form of dis-

course: ‘Antara does not question poetry itself as a medium for higher




thoughts or even as a tradition. He does, however, notice something from

within the tradition: It has become too congested, having re-created life,or

so it seems, in its sum total. The magnitude of its accomplishment, para-

doxically, leads to its exit from history. Its representation of life is so com-

plete now as to have become an appropriation. After all, representation is an

activity that, by definition, must occur at a distance from the represented,

allowing that which has already been represented to be represented once

more. Once such an activity seems impossible—except by sheer cynicism—

the poet halts, now no longer strictly facing the ruins, his view of them

clouded by all that poetic clamor about them, and asks, as though to clear

up the suffocating jumble of previous words standing between him and the

sight: What is this speech that seems to have laid claim to all prefigurations?A tradition allows a claimant a regulated entrance into a prefigured

world with known boundaries. Questioning, or even noticing, its conges-

tion does not entail a rejection of the world it prefigures. Thus, ‘Antara’s

halfhearted unease must fail to produce anything new, since only a radical

departure from such a tradition—in fact, from poetry itself—could allow

the prefigured world to be represented again as an experience or could

re-create a totally new arena of representation. But for the time being,

‘Antara could only do more of the same, attempting once more to overdo

the ritual of the ruins. Poetry had finally covered up, through the enor-

mity of its presence, the representative claim of an antecedent language of

everyday life. Poetry’s claim to being the language that engulfs all things in

its adventures of representation was not yet to be contested. The experi-

ence of poetry itself confused things, with its project of confining the

world into variable images, all introduced by loss and departure. One

could spend a lifetime in that figurative location, hoping now and then toperhaps expand the chambers of experience a bit. For the time being,

nothing more could be done, until the ruins were finally out of sight, lan-

guishing where they could offer advice no longer.

the wandering l ogic

The ruins, however, had provided a semblance of unity in discourse, in a

way that suggests other modes by which logical unities were establishedin representative speech. Al-A‘sha’s ode, for example, contains a second

lengthy act of halting (beginning in couplet 26), situated in a tavern. The




variety of discourses and thematics inspired by that locale—wine, conver-

sation, love, longing, and lust—possess a peculiar unity governed by the

scene in which this halting takes place, namely, the tavern. As Hurayrah—

the departing lover with whom the ode begins—assures the return of all

thematics and images to the scene governed by her presence, so does the

scene of the tavern, which governs the unity of all that is spoken in it. The

only common structure of such unities is that of a presence within a spa-

tial scene, so that when the departing Hurayrah finally disappears or when

the tavern closes its doors and throws the drunkards out, the presences

maintaining these discursive unities are finally aborted. In the representa-

tional discourse of a society whose norm is movement, diverse themes are

not brought together on the basis of transcendental or formal logic. They could only manifest their unity in relationship to a halting act confirmed

by a singular scene that is, in any case, temporary.

In some cases, however, a self-contained theme—as opposed to a self-

contained scene—takes over through a particular form of potent moral

“introduction.” ‘Antara’s impressively uninterrupted sequence of heroic

poetry (c. 63–76), for instance, is introduced by an opposition of ideas, an

opposition that is soon left behind: couplet 63 portrays a betrayal; couplet

64, an act of faithfulness. Two irreconciliable poles of the morality of at-

tachments set the scene for the clash to follow:

I am told that ‘Amr is ungrateful for my beneficience,

and ingratitude is a heaviness to the soul of the benefactor.

I have minded well the counsel my uncle gave me in the forenoon

when fearfully the lips drew back from the mouth’s white teeth

in the thick of death, of whose agonies the true hero

utters no complaint, other than a muffled cry. (c. 63–65)

It is clear that such an “introduction” is not meant to historicize the

war or to present a cause, as in the case of the poets speaking for the tribe,

such as ‘Amru or al-Harith; nor is it meant to introduce its direct protago-

nists or to shed a light on their nature. Here, introducing a persistent

theme entails bounding it by the ropes of a moral milieu, which would

then invite a discourse of justification (for example, ‘Amru), adjudication

(for example, Labid), or settlement (for example, Zuhair). The moral mi-lieu which for ‘Antara introduces heroic qualities addresses neither a net-

work of causalities nor the protagonists themselves or their virtues. Rather,




it establishes a general situation of opposition between moral ideas. This

technique of introducing could be seen as characteristic to a wandering

society: As nature seems to form itself in a piecemeal fashion along the way

of the wanderer, its elements forge their connectedness in the order by which

they are encountered rather than through a preconceived or posterior system

of interdependencies . The latter conception is characteristic of the settled

society, where fundamental themes are juxtaposed with respect to a sys-

tem, an enclosure, a closed territory to which all things must come back to

be judged. Such a trope is condensed in the Qur’anic reinterpretation of

life as a journey back to Allah. But under conditions of wandering, themes

and observations seem to accumulate along a chronology of forgotten

openings and within an expedition oblivious to its conclusion or other-wise unaware of the sedentary status of a conclusion as a unitary “lock”

upon thematic variety.

For the wanderer, the introduction does not entail the necessity of

being revisited at the end of speech. The traditional opening, as we have

seen, does not “introduce” as much as lay the poem’s claim to be in the

realm of poetics, thereby differently adjusting the listening faculties. The

occasional moral milieu within the poem is not so much the context for

what is to follow as a force moving the discourse into one of several pos-

sible directions. The ending of a theme in nomadic poetry, therefore, is

always provisional. One way to “end” a heroic sequence, for instance, is

with a conclusive note of healing, which by no means ends the poem. For

example, at the end of the long heroic sequence in ‘Antara’s ode, the poet

proclaims his satisfaction and indicates his readiness to cease the battle:

“And oh, my soul was cured, and its faint sickness was healed” (c. 76). The

healing was premised on ‘Antara’s identity being finally acknowledged.The mere invocation of his name is now sufficient to solicit an expected

response: “By the horsemen’s cry, . . . ‘On with you, [‘Antara has come!].’”

For the sedentaries, a healing would readily offer itself as one of the most

appropriate sites to conclude the adventure and the speech. Yet unlike in

the edicts of the salvation religion rearing its head slowly in the land, re-

covery here is not in itself an objective. When the eye can still discern a bit

of a yet-to-be-crossed distance, no matter how mediocre, and contrast

that to the virtue of a unifying conclusion presenting itself shortly beforethat horizon, continued wandering wins. The virtue of unifying conclu-

sivities had not been discovered yet. Thus the ode crosses into the last




remaining distance (c. 77–80), where it ends while ‘Antara is still on the

move, still on the back of his camel. Only the horizon, the boundary of

natural exhaustion, shall end the speech.

Such an attitude, which typifies the odes in general, emanates from an

ingrained suspicion of the purpose of subjective planning in life.The most

extreme manifestation of this mind-set is spelled out in Tarafa’s ode,

in which all the notions of differential status that could result from a

purposefully conceived life were seen to be fundamentally empty. When

Tarafa embarked on his fateful trip to Bahrain (where he was predictably

put to death by the governor), it was as though he was following a destiny,

being fully aware of the consequences, and being fully aware as well that

consequences were not the essence of a life conditioned by a free flowof movement. To be, after all, is in this case to be on the move, even if

the source of movement happens to lie outside of or be independent of

any notion of the self. Movement was in the nature of things. The act of

halting, which, as we have seen, occasioned a discursive outgrowth in the

form of poetry, was a moment of interrupting nature’s eternal course. The

journey was to continue thereafter, carrying the poetic baggage along.

The poem, after the traditional halting, continues into unforseen, un-

predictable, inconsequential, inconclusive gesticulations in the mode of

movement. The endings of the odes seem to be unimportant. There was

no effort at “concluding,” tying the themes together, deriving a final lesson,

reformulating an original thesis, re-posing a question, returning to the be-

ginning, and so on. The imagery, character, content, spirit, and discontinu-

ous occurrence of the end are similar to those of any other point in the po-

etic narrative. The end, in other words, was interchangeable with any other

point in the story, save for the traditional opening. There did not seem tobe any conception of an “end.” Where it ends, the ode could also go on.

The end of the ode is a matter of natural exhaustion, like the end of

wandering itself, an activity that included rest stops, after each of which a

whole new journey began, a whole new speech. This was the manner of

movement, as lived by a discerning eye, recording as it moved along the

road the variations of themes and the continuous displacement of views

and thus topics.An eye attentive to all that could be observed and rendered

through a form that would preserve it after it had been passed by. This col-lecting speech transforms all externalities on the road into possessions to

be taken along. At the “end” of the journey, naturally, an immense weight




of objects would have been acquired. This weight, in turn, was simply laid

down by the side of the road. The only major observation about it was that

a “production” (or a collection of images of a journey) could outlast the

life of the producer (or the collector). That was an entirely new phenome-

non in the desert; before, nothing had seemed to promise this survival ex-

cept the faint hope that the creating patriarch’s blood would be preserved

in his descendants, which was one of the ingredients aggrandizing blood

kinships, genealogical tables, and the collective subjectivity of the tribe. It

is not as though the search for everlastingness is posited here as a primal

human instinct. Rather, like other possibilities, this one became percep-

tible in the vigorous survival of a reproducible record.

With this fundamental observation, life begins to appear as a project,which provides the idea of conclusion with a unique status in speech, a

status to which the ode was oblivious. For a society living upon the path

itself and not toward its culmination, “conclusion” had only entailed the

termination of life itself. The nomadic logic conflated the notions of con-

clusion and ending, unlike the sedentary logic, in which the conclusion

was made to be the harvest of labor and the zone of preserved essence. But

under nomadism, the conclusion was merely scattered like dust over

the arbitrary site where halting occured. With every step along the path

canceling out the one before, nomadic ending was such a perpetual oc-

currence that it no longer appeared distinctly. Indeed, if there was a con-

clusion, it was located at the beginning of the ode, where the perpetual

disruption of all schemes to end wandering was ritually announced. In

a life conditioned by a mode of departure, there were no conclusions:

Nothing was brought “back” home. Home itself was no more than the

back of the faithful camel, the journey itself toward the mirage, towardthe horizon, toward the ruinous site, or into the memory; home was the

mythical companionship of cotravelers.

Under sedentary conditions of discourse, a successful conclusion is a

successful crossing back into familiar lands, languages, audiences, habits

of thinking, and methods of presentation, in order to give a summary of

an adventure, a summary that could—as a permanent record—substitute

for the adventure itself, even obviate the need for its repetition. Thus, the

idea of salvation, where the record is central to adjudication, becomes aprime posited purpose for the journey of life. Indeed, influential trends in

Qur’anic exegesis have explicitly conceived of life as a voyage (safar ) to-




ward God. This journey, in turn, presupposes the necessary support insti-

tutions, such as rest stops and signposts.10 The sedentary notion of a con-

clusion consists of the effort to rescue the essence from the teeth of the

“excessive ground”—too many surrounding words, too many possible

meanings. The sedentary conclusion is the reward and meaning for a new

conception of labor, whereby labor is no longer synonymous with life but

an outgrowth conspicuously added to the meaning of life. Sedentary soci-

ety thus encapsulated labor within a concept of “return” to the ground of

stable residence, whereby it became governed by a cyclical nature. Under

nomadism, the essence was neither a brief occurrence, a condensation

of a totality, nor an activity of cyclical return but, rather, a ubiquity of

equally poeticizable events and nonevents along a path. Crossing the pathwas no more than a profound listening to the whole story, until it termi-

nated itself in the mode of an exhaustion. This path was not an excessive

ground to be discursively reconfigured and narrowed down. There was no

specific reclamation of labor that a conclusion could bring back. Uttered

from the outset as in the ode, the nomadic conclusion could only announce

the perpetual effacement of the product of labor and the perpetual depar-

ture and hopeless disappearance of the laborer.

One of the clearest manifestations of this operation, especially as com-

pared to its use in Qur’anic speech, is the use of symbolization. In the ode,

the symbol parallels the experience of wandering in the sense that—with

notable exceptions—it ceases to reinforce its original referent shortly upon

invocation, calling new referents instead. In Zuhair’s ode, the metaphors

used to describe war include fire, millstones, a breeding she-camel, and

a crop:

When you stir it up, it’s a hateful thing you’ve stirred up;

ravenous it is, once you whet its appetite; it bursts aflame,

then it grinds you as a millstone grinds on its cushion;

yearly it conceives, birth upon birth, and with twins for issue—

very ill-omened are the boys it bears you, every one of them

the like of Ahmar of ‘Ad; then it gives suck, and weans them.

Yes, war yields you a harvest very different from the bushels

and pieces of silver those fields in Iraq yield for the villagers. (c. 30–33)

One sees here two sets of images. First, there are instruments—fire, mill-

stones—which operate in a predictable manner (fire burns and millstones




case of the odes, the symbol maintained a close proximity to the world of

substance. Discourse had its own reality, a phenomenon conducive to

Qur’anic and other mystical literary productions. Things, categories, op-

erations, orders of being—all merely needed to be spoken of according

to particular formats, in order for them to blossom into a self-contained

reality. To speak symbolically was to add the symbol to the world. The

distance between the invocation of the name of God and feeling God’s

presence—itself confirmed by hearing God’s words—was accomplished.

Since the encyclopedic understanding of the domain of the ode meant

that there was no reality safe from the reach of words, there were also no

new realities that could fail to be summoned by words to the infinite

inventory of the archive of the times. Reality was not simply detected by the sense experience, evident in the effort invested in specific geography

at the moment of halting. Rather, it also became all that could be salvaged

from nonbeing by a form of discourse. Everything was added together:

the symbol, the empirical, and the experiential. The entirety of discon-

nected experiences associated with wandering, such as in the case of

Labid or ‘Antara, were united only by the path upon which they occurred.

Under nomadism, it was not the destination but the path upon which life

was to be lived.

Elements of this priority of path over fundamental, unified referent are

also available in the sira tradition (biographies of the prophet) as it per-

tains to the piecemeal revelation of the Qur’an. In fact, it was not until

Muhammad was firmly entrenched as a source of unifying political au-

thority in Medina that he began to pay specific attention to logical and

practical doctrinal unity. It was at that point that believers were pro-

nounced to be equivalent to the infidels if they believed in one revelationwhile disbelieving another.12 The additive nature of the revelation now

had to be refocused to a fundamental point of return, especially in light

of the discovery that simply and openly following one’s desired gaze—as

in the ode—would destroy the whole corpus. This was never more obvi-

ous than in the experience of a lonely and overwhelmed Muhammad in

Mecca finding himself praising the idols, as if they were simply another

component of the idea of deity. At a somewhat less problematic level,

Muhammad and the early believers saw clearly and accepted that theQur’an, rather than anticipating events, was commenting on them as they

occurred, that it had changed its mind on some matters, and that some




later instructions either expanded on, ignored, rendered pointless, or even

contradicted some earlier revelations. Although he blamed major blun-

ders, like the praise of idols, on the intervention of the demon, in a very

rare confession, Allah admitted that he himself was responsible for many

minor alterations, since otherwise it would be too aggrandizing to the

demon’s authority to assign them all to him: “If We abrogate a verse or

cause it to be forgotten, We will replace it by a better one or one similar.”13

Thus, here there is in the Qur’an a demonstration of the path-inspired

logic of progression that one usually associates with the nomadic ode.

But the Qur’anic additive logic involves an important qualification. The

path is no longer simply cumulative; rather, it assumes the structure and

logic of a unified—though tactically amendable—mission. This missionrequired, in turn, certain forms of structural discursive stabilities, many

of which paralleled existing or emerging tropes of poetic speech.

sources of structural stability

Though the themes and images prevalent in the Qur’an, odes, and other

circulating discourses are difficult to compare fully in the narrow scope

of this outline, two basic sources of structural stability can be found

throughout, sources that emerge from logical orientations to be found

outside the field of language proper. The first has to do with a discovery of

“value,” which then advises cyclical structures that return to value. The

other has to do with scenes of confrontation, which advise structures that

are defined by a continually present adversary.

In the odes, items of “concrete value” (such as the camel, which makes

life in the desert possible) tend to enjoy a particular resilience in memory.In such cases,memory operates so as to prevent the metaphor from stealing

the original object, as was the case otherwise with all objects not endowed

with a comparable assessment of value. Memory here acts like an extended

tether that would allow the metaphor to throw its weight into the depths

of the distance, while ensuring that it would neither fly away and assume

its independence as the logic of wandering would otherwise dictate nor dis-

sipate in a way that left behind a bewildering void. The most remarkable

instance of such a structure is provided in Labid’s ode, where metaphors arepresented in a structure of circles, one woven into the web of the other,

folding and unfolding to face a layer outside and another inside.14




Both internal metaphoric cycles (the asses, the wild cow) pose the

question of survival against immense odds. They commence with por-

trayals of loneliness and austerity. Destitute, disoriented, exhausted, the

animals spend the bulk of their story doomed to movement, dislocation,

and search. In the first case, the arduous venture leads to an oasis, a dis-

covery celebrated in two couplets. Thereafter the poet finds nothing more

to add. So a similarly structured metaphorical cycle is unleashed. The sec-

ond cycle is even more laborious, and includes three successive moments

of distress. A wild cow searches for her supposedly devoured infants. In

the process she is exposed to floods, and after that she is detected by

hunters. The first set concludes with confirming the irretrievability of loss

(as at the end of the traditional opening). The second is a moment of

pondering the next step (pondering, that is, while nature does its usual

work: rain, night, dawn); the third comes from without, while the pon-dering had produced nothing other than the acknowledgment of loss and

also loneliness. This movement comes to the wild cow, thus, in her state of

surrender to fate, to destiny, to the laws of the wilderness, to the muddiness

of the inhospitable landscape. From the depth of this existential abyss, she

is forced now to fight for her life. It is her final chance to reemerge, lest

she perish altogether (c. 51). She emerges victorious. The cycle ends. The

she-camel reemerges, also triumphant, undoubtedly reliable. The loss has

been redeemed not by bringing the dead back to life but by a show of vigor that guarantees the continuation of the already-present life. Loss is

overcome through strength, not retrieval, a theme more appropriate for


Nawar NawarCamelCamel

obstacles obstacles

(16) (55)(53)(22)

She-ass+ companion

She-ass+ companion

(25) (35)

Wildcow

Wildcow

(36) (52)



the nascent sedentary conception of justice. In this case, the one who sur-

vives is the one who is capable not only of fighting but also of forgetting,

precisely as one repeats the same cycle shortly thereafter.

Furthermore, the metaphoric cycles here are ordered hierarchically in

accordance with a system of values. Thus, Labid does not bring his most

valued endowment, namely, the she-camel, out of her metaphoric hiding

place until he guarantees that all danger has been eliminated. The first

sequence was apparently not sufficient, neither in learned attributes of

drama, complexity, compassion, endurance, or vigor. Couplet 36 thus

witnesses an unsure reemergence and a quick retreat behind the curtains

of the metaphor (afatilka, amm . . . , “is [she] so, or . . .”). The attributes of

the animal are then buttressed by experiences of search for lost kinfolk,enduring the trials of the wasteland, and staying put in a struggle against

others for survival. Thus, the sequence of the asses brings out substan-

tiations of character, which then supplement the original item of value.

Thus, such an ordered, planned speech also admits of experimentation.

Yet it values experiments in a uniquely path-oriented way: Rather than

being confined to the best of that which was said or attempted about its

topic, it adds the experiment to the finalized version.

This elaborate experimentation following cyclical structures is absent

from the other great portrayals of the camel in the mu‘allaqat, especially

Tarafa’s. Tarafa’s she-camel always stands as her own figure and metaphor.

There are no great cycles of memory; there is merely a linear progression

of elements, an extended look at all occurrences of the animal’s anatomy,

features, and ways of moving. In both cases, however, the camel’s dis-

course is begun with a seemingly eccentric characterization of feebleness,

which is properly contextualized shortly thereafter. But her essential char-acter is not normative decrepitude but age, a sign of endurance rather

than decay. Figures of speed and swift movement follow, fully counter-

balancing any suspicion of uselessness. Labid, however, orders the speech

in the form of cycles of memory, whereby the item of supreme value is

poised to reemerge from the grips of successive metaphorical cycles at

the end of the speech. With such a planned speech, the camel can run

through a substantial portion of the ode without being detected by name.

That is, it waits in gestation for the series of experimentations to lead toits metaphorized perfection. Only then does the camel appear in name

again, only to announce its already demonstrated faultlessness.




Perfecting the image of the camel, which leads to its departure from

the ode, opens in this case a yet larger cycle of memory encompassing it.

Immediately thereafter (c. 55), we witness a sudden reawakening of the

figure of the lover Nawar, after nearly forty verses of absence. She enters

not as an uncontextualized figure but as she was before her story was

interrupted, being still compounded by the thematic of breaking. That

crucial thematic, as it is structured here, rapidly invites a series of prob-

lematic oppositions: break versus choice, subjectivity versus freedom,

hedonism versus austerity, dream versus discipline. We have crossed a

blinding figural jungle only to return, after thinking that the poet had ac-

knowledged the overpowering distance and flown away, back home, pre-

cisely on that camel that resembles a “roseate cloud, rain-emptied, thatflies with the south wind.” But it was on this instrument, it turns out, that

the poet had been flying toward Nawar’s forbidden land. In a remarkable

cyclical structure, Labid reminds the audience of the original—now al-

most forgotten—problematic, restating the original case before reenter-

ing Nawar’s figural territory. He revisits the possibilities of choice and

freedom over breaking, paraphrasing the couplets immediately preceding

the original abandonment of Nawar’s theme (c. 21–22). It appears, thus,

that the discourse that is bounded by couplets 16 and 56 constitutes a

closed, autonomous space within the sphere of Labid’s ode. The couplets

before couplet 15 are a matter of tribute to tradition; those after 56 are a

new movement, which is not as readily structurable.

Examples of this structure abound throughout the Qur’an, where

metaphors of nature as well as tales of earlier prophets (which are pre-

sumed to be already familiar to its readers) explicitly serve as moral

lessons, not as self-enclosed themes. Yet unlike the structures evident inLabid’s ode, for instance, images of decrepitude and weakness on earth do

not necessarily establish the ground for metaphorical or symbolic sur-

vival. Nor do they instigate a semblance of the ruins-oriented meditation,

where loss is acknowledged as a norm of nature and henceforth is left to

stand. Rather, death and injustice, which can result from earthly predica-

ments, are possible and indeed recurrent historical events. But since life

itself is little more than a cyclical journey back to God, tales and meta-

phors regarding it cannot be—in sum—other than cyclical metaphoricalstructures.

The major departure from this cyclical predicament occasions the




earthly realities of confrontation and actual struggle, which require a dif-

ferent posture and structure of stability. This was to be in abundant sup-

ply during Muhammad’s later career. Many Qur’anic surahs (for example,

al-Fath, al-Anbiya’) teem with thematics presumptive of stable con-

frontational scenes. The general jahili structure of a confrontational scene

is expressed most obviously in the ode of ‘Amru Ibn Kalthum, which is

largely maintained by an extended and unilinear heroic posture. Here, the

“skin rusted from the long wearing” of armory (c. 71) refers openly to a

weariness with a confrontation that cannot be aborted or made to shift

direction, since it had been presented as being irreconcilable. So how does

it end? If the metaphorical reservoir of themes of confrontation is of a

confinable and exhaustible dimension, then such an ode could be expectedto collapse under the weight of its own unilinearity of motive. But in this

case, ‘Amru’s ode is poverty-stricken on metaphorization, particularly fol-

lowing the setting up of the sober scene of confrontation (c. 20). There-

after the speaker had to be continuously on guard against the imposing

reality of such a scene, which disallowed journeying into the unpredicta-

ble, consumptive land of symbols.

Thus, ‘Amru could use neither Zuhair’s mode of symbolization, in

which the symbol assumes a life of its own, nor the retrievable meta-

phorization with which Labid infuses his cyclical structure. In ‘Amru’s

ode, there is no cycle assuring the return of the symbol to the place of its

launching, nor does the intensity of the conflict allow a flight away via

free-spirited symbolization. When the women of the tribe are brought in

(c. 89), they operate as but one more step in the endless fortification of

the scene. Their praise is relatively quick-paced, nervous, almost inatten-

tive, as though the speaker is on guard for other dangers looming aroundthis and all previous signs of tribal might and virtue. Thus, no hedonism

is allowed to cause a rupture at this juncture: The discourse of the collec-

tive subject must be always attentive to duty.

Under the dictates of irreconcilable confrontation, duty entails condi-

tions that would make triumph over others possible. The confrontational

Qur’anic surah of al-Fath concludes by pointing out that the maturation

of the believers into a credible force is intended as a divinely inspired fact

to be paraded in front of their adversaries: “They are like the seed whichputs forth its shoot and strengthens it, so that it rises stout and firm upon

its stalk, delighting the sowers. Through them He seeks to enrage the




unbelievers.”15 Here, the product of nature and labor attains significance

not because of an intrinsic virtue that would allow it to appear cyclically

as its own self-referent but, rather, because it registers the promise of a

final victory after a protracted battle against the same enemy. The need to

maintain a solid front is clearly behind the severe, unforgiving Qur’anic

denunciations of unreliable allies, whether nomads (the a‘rab in al-Fath)

or sedentaries (the Munafiqun,“two-faced,” who constituted Muhammad’s

proclaimed as well as clandestine opposition in Medina).16

Since these forms of confrontation are seen, both in the Qur’an and in

the odes, as interruptions of norms, they usually invite a search for con-

clusive modalities of ending. ‘Amru’s remarkably consistent panegyric,

thus, does indeed have the semblance of a conclusive sequence (c. 91–96),which parades the grandiose attributes of the tribe, leaving the audience

with this final warning:

So let no man act foolishly [ yajhalanna ] against us,

or we shall exceed the folly of the foolhardiest [ fanajhalu fauqa jahli l-jahilina ].

(c. 92)

There is a semantic play here that establishes a total, impenetrable stiff-

ness, which is the condition of a safe withdrawal: Jahl had the dual mean-

ing of “ignorance” and “temperamental insensibility.” It is introduced as a

“truthful” knowledge, the arrival at which had been announced early on

as the objective of the whole speech (c. 8, 20). Here, the only knowledge

that could assuredly protect this collective subject, after all, is the enemy’s

knowledge of its ability to attain catastrophic ignorance.

In contrast, Qur’anic confrontations highlight the power of knowledge,

which is uniquely available to the believers and is explicitly introduced—against jahl —as a source of tranquil and confident power, even if, or pre-

cisely because, adversaries are unaware of it.17 ‘Amru, on the other hand, is

aware that only the paraded virtues of the tribe could offer at least a nego-

tiable withdrawal from or an abrogation of a confrontational scene. Such

virtues include in this case the tribe’s uncultivated, rugged nature, fright-

ening as they confirm the universally knowable consequences of igno-

rance. The power of the Muslims, by contrast, was based on knowledge

whose dynamics of communal empowerment were known to them alone.Scenes of confrontation usually invite a search for sources of empow-

erment, which in this case are found in existing social structures. For the




prophet, they are found beyond this world altogether and by way of

abstract and distant examples, since this world, along with the knowledge

it provides, cannot produce success in this novel venture.18 Failure to

achieve consistent success is still possible but is no longer necessarily

calamitous. While jahili disempowerment led periodically to accepting

finitude as the norm—as can be observed in the case of ‘Ubayd or in the

practice of i‘tifad —loss now could be accepted as an ingredient within a

cyclical cosmic plan: “If you have suffered a defeat, so did the enemy. We

alternate these vicissitudes among mankind so that God may know the

true believers and choose martyrs from among you.”19




Part II: The Faith



the land dreams of a prophet

The pre-Islamic epoch witnessed a profusion of prophets and sages.

Reports abound of mystics and diviners preaching doctrines and even

sayings not far removed from what Muhammad was to articulate with

more decisive impact. In addition to the hanifs (Abrahamic reformers) al-

ready discussed, some claimants to prophecy disputed Muhammad’s en-

titlement, and one in particular—Musaylimah—posed a serious threat

to the nascent Islamic polity after his death. The Qur’an itself indirectly

registered the anticipatory mood by assigning to Muhammad the three

roles of bearing conclusive good news (mubashsheran), conveying warn-

ings (nadhir ), and serving as a witness (shahidan) for the direction of his

times.1

Delegating responsibility for spiritual transformation to a prophet is

no arbitrary matter. Entrusting an epochal project to a mere individual

raises the specific question of why venues other than prophethood were

not seen as suitable for the accomplishment of the task at hand. It alsointroduces problems with regard to the interplay between the requisites

of the task and those encumbent upon a more customary communal

143

s ix

Prophetic Constitution



leadership role. The emergence of such a figure cannot simply be attrib-

uted to “individual genius,” although personal attributes do no doubt play

a role. More importantly, the prophetic figure must demonstrate other-

worldly links and proceed beyond the threshold of ordinary sagehood.

The establishment of these credentials is usually judged in the context of

prevalent notions of individuality and customary venues of prominence.

Thus, examining the idea of prophethood as such would tell us more

about an ancient social landscape than about the trials and tribulations

of the prophet himself. It is in this spirit that I wish to examine the

emergence, constitution, and condensation of the idea of prophethood in

Muhammad’s case, rather than simply narrate once more well-known

biographical details.

Who Is a Prophet?

The question of prophethood, as a phenomenon predicated upon a

unique and distinct individuality, is intricately linked to the question of

uniquely legitimate and nonreproducible authority. Who would grant

such an authority to a mere kin relative like Muhammad, whose life had

been so constantly ordinary before the moment of proclamation? Within

the ideational confines of ordinary, experienced, traditional society, which

abhors novelty and lives according to the claimed example of the fore-

fathers, perhaps only a few detached souls. The legitimacy of the prophet,

therefore, comes from elsewhere. It emanates not only from “above” but,

in a significant way, from the past itself. The prophet here descends from a

tradition more authentic and everlasting than that of mortal society.

Throughout the Qur’an, the prophets of ancient history appear as found-

ing fathers of society, and in the context of pagan Mecca they are resur-rected from the dust of moral oblivion in which they had languished for

centuries in order to testify in one voice to their coming from the same

divine source. In this spirit, the idea of prophethood is couched in terms

of stories of social origin, now introduced as an advisory prehistory for

the present.

Muhammad’s prophetic genealogy is not ascertained only through

abstract scriptural revelation; rather, it commences with rare direct con-

tacts with that tradition. In a story that illuminates the significance of thistrope, al-Tabari relates an episode in which Muhammad recalls being

taken by the archangels Gabriel and Mikhael to see his “fathers”—Adam

144 • Prophetic Constitution



and Abraham—who reside in the first and seventh heavens, respectively.2

In the intervening heavens, he saw his “brothers” Jehova, Jesus, Idris, Aaron,

Moses, and Joseph.3 Here, prophetic identity is grounded upon images of

traditional tribal relations, as they operate in a spatiotemporally distant

realm demanded by the abstract and universal nature of God. The final

paternal nature of God consolidates the familial imprints through which

prophetic entitlement is addressed. The prophets of this family embody

stories of incomplete success with their constituents, but through no fault

of their own. Thus, both Moses and Jesus are excused in the Qur’an from

the “revisionism” of their followers, with the blame being placed squarely

on the latter. The prophets resemble brothers of one family, who are infal-

lible only to the extent that the will of Allah dictates. Allah himself is oftenintroduced as a merciful-vengeful parental character who frequently in-

terferes in order to shield his messengers from the mockery and brutality

of their constituents—in a manner unmistakably similar to that of a fa-

ther who intervenes to protect a son from the mistakes of his first inde-

pendent venture outside of the home.

Such a formulation takes the image of familial relationships in

Bedouin and sedentary societies as its model. As the most homogeneous

and cohesive social institution, such a family was unquestionably patriar-

chal. In subtribal feuds, the degree of closeness to any nasab (line of de-

scent) largely determined the alliances, and the immediate brothers were

bound together, right or wrong. The preeminence of one member of the

family translated into preeminence for all, and likewise for shame. If

all prophets are viewed as brothers, then together they acquire sufficient

distance from the traditional bonds imposed on them by their accident of

birth, while the model for the relation among them continues to be thefamily. But this holy family establishes a distance from the traditional

family, a distance that allows prophets to experiment with the dual role of

struggling against and belonging to their communities of birth.

Brothers share a destiny, a similarity of character, and the source of their

inspiration. Once the realization comes about that they had been relaying

the same message of the same God from the beginning of time, then the

boundaries of the family are immediately met. That is, by providing a

concrete example of the concept “family,” the addition of new membersmust be controlled rigorously, since the quality of each member will re-

flect on all. And if this family is discovered to have been in transhistorical

Prophetic Constitution • 145



existence in an unparalleled way, then additional members can only

decrease the sanctity of its conceptual integrity.4 And from such logics

(boundedness of the concrete, revealing the plan as an act of conclusion)

came Muhammad’s emphatic assertion that he was the last of the prophets;

the one to whom the plan is revealed is at the same time the one to be en-

trusted with the task of bringing it to a conclusion.

As retold in the Qur’an, the stories of the prophets anticipate the rejec-

tion of prophetic claims by society as an almost inevitable outcome of the

project of prophethood itself. But more importantly, ancient prophets are

consistently unrepentant for having disrupted the status quo. If anything,

they do not even claim to be bringing anything new, but rather stress that

they are restoring an old order that had been suppressed by contempora-neous society. In the story above, Ismael, the “father of the Arabs,” and his

own father Abraham clearly abhor the departure of the Arabs from a for-

gotten tradition that was explicitly antipagan.5 This construction, with the

founding fathers testifying against their distant offspring, was effective

not only because it invoked portions of existing stories of social origin

but also because it redirected their purview to a teleological seal, while

at the same time neutralizing the ever-present alternatives of other book

religions, namely, Christianity and Judaism. These were recognized as

links in a chain of a divine plan, although both entailed criticizable short-

comings. Both were imprisoned within the sociocultural contexts of their

moment of introduction, with Judaism being confined to exclusive tribal

enclaves and Christianity leaving little impact on the collective morality

of the tribes adhering to it, not to mention its sectarianism, which Islam

decried. Thus, though the prophetic qualities of Moses and Jesus were

confirmed, their followers were denounced on a variety of theological andbehavioral points, ranging from diluting monotheism,6 to factional in-

fighting,7 to betraying their prophets,8 to lacking relevant rules of social

ethics.9

The Audience of the Prophet

As one aspect of the process of ascertaining credentials for an audience,

the interrogation of the past had some foundations in pre-Islamic peda-

gogies. In pre-Islamic poetry, a number of evocative symbols that es-tablish the poetic flow address directly both the past and an audience.

Standing before a ruined site, as mentioned in previous chapters, was the




traditional formula by which the pre-Islamic ode opened. The ruins were

conceived in no unambiguous fashion as referents to a lost past in which

the life of the poet was implicated. The traces were moreover directly ad-

dressed and interrogated as if they were themselves an original audience.

Eventually, the ruined site is abandoned in the ode in exchange for a more

present audience of companions, who accompany the poet in halting

in front of the past as a ritual of discourse initiation. In Imru’ l-Qays’s

seminal ode, the ordeal of halting is assisted by two companions, who

watch the poet’s lamentation and listen to the flood of memories they

provoke. Silently, this audience watches the entire transformation. But it

consists of more than passive listeners. They lift the poet from the abyss of

self-annihilation-by-remembrance: “There my companions halted theirbeasts awhile over me / saying, ‘Don’t perish of sorrow; restrain yourself

decently!’” (c. 5).

They say no more for the rest of the ode. Yet this “saying”is sufficient to

rescue the one who remembers from the impasse brought about by the

ruins’ fundamental infertility and unresponsiveness. At the point of rec-

ognizing the audience, the poet stands again, acknowledging them and

proclaiming a recovery, and leaps into the second movement of the ode.

The audience has become present. It confirmed itself first by halting when

an invocation to that effect was delivered and then by speaking. This con-

stitution of an audience rescues the narrator from the loneliness of self-

reflection, for which the desert landscape can only offer the mock conso-

lation of a ruined site—a sign of the impossibility of reclaiming the past.

The companions in pre-Islamic poetry invite the narrator to depart from

the silent ruins and come back to the adventures of the present. The act of

“speaking”by the companions confirms more than a simple dialogic pres-ence. It also delivers a trust in the power of ordered (poetic) words and

re-proves, at the same moment, that listening has already been occur-

ring. The moment of halting is the moment of examining not merely the

meaning of residence (which, as the ruins testify, is temporary), but also

the meaning of presence. Now both, poet and audience, are to linger in

the halting. The flux of unregistered time stops. There emerges an ode,

registering what had been lost and anticipating what is to be gained, and a

world is made for the sake of listening. At the moment of halting, there-fore, history begins: It becomes possible to tell a story.

The idea of prophethood, on the other hand, is premised on a drive to




regain the past rather than simply to lament its irretrievable loss. As such,

it requires a different procedure of audience constitution. Here, the past

has a singular, teleological meaning precisely because it points to an on-

going transhistorical story that is about to be concluded. This feature

means that such a story cannot be abandoned in the unceremonious

manner by which the ruined site is habitually forgotten in the ode; rather,

the very essence of the ancient tale is the ground for its resumption in the

present. Here, the story is not only narrated, it is also brought back to

life by adding another character—a prophet—who resembles its protag-

onists and who for that reason is the only character who can end it. The

uniqueness of such a story is itself underwritten by the conception of a

prophet, simultaneously an actor and a voice for synthetic and uncon-tested interpretation.

Pre-Islamic society, however, offered no stage from which a speaker

who did not claim to be a poet could address an audience in this fashion.

Bedouins recognized no strictly binding hierarchy, especially one to which

they had not consented, and their material ideology and near egalitarian-

ism rendered claims to prophecy highly suspicious. Thus, the Bedouins

were the last group to join Islam in Arabia, and many of them reneged im-

mediately after the death of Muhammad, only to be brought back into

line by force during the short reign of the first caliph, Abi Bakr. On the

other hand, the more differentiated society of Mecca posed a different

problem for the notion of a prophet. There, social and economic hier-

archy was both noticeable and recognized. Muhammad himself was par-

tially immune from reprisals for many years, largely because he belonged

to the relatively influential Hashemites of Quraysh. But in any case, he

was neither close to the helm of the branch nor a distinguished Meccan inother ways. Many well-to-do Qurayshans refused to listen to what a com-

mon man had to say in his capacity as a prophet, as they equated legiti-

macy of discourse with personal prominence, and personal prominence,

in turn, with economic well-being.10

In the traditional sira (biographies of the prophet) that impasse was

overcome by suspending the prophet-audience dialectic for several years

and replacing it with a dialogic God-prophet cycle, which finally estab-

lished a prophetic right to an earthly audience on the basis of Allah’s ca-pacity to reverse human standards and reality. Here, the idea of the prophet

did not evaporate into reclusive, otherworldly mysticism, precisely because




ordinary social values were not rejected in their entirety; the prophet was

possible precisely because such values could be reallocated. The tiny early

surah (chapter) of al-Kauthar concluded as much in one quick stroke.

There, a certain nemesis of Muhammad is addressed as an abtar (a de-

rogatory term for a married man who had no male heirs), who in reality

was none other than Muhammad himself.11 The Qur’an here acknowl-

edged the shameful substance of the word when it reallocated it to the

enemy of the prophet. How a man with male heirs could become an abtar

in Allah’s world was never made clear, since the surah expressed a will to

revenge rather than an articulation of reason.

The act of revenge must reproduce the original transgression in the

name of justice, since it was revenge for a specific act rather than an ar-ticulation of a universal principle of justice. It must therefore return to

the perpetrators their transgression as it was understood, that is, in its

quality and language as a transgression. In one sense, that is why the will

to revenge is so capable of displacing the universality of abstract reason.

Such a conception of the will to revenge was uniquely adapted to a God

who was under no obligation to explain the unexplainable. The insult to

Muhammad was understood as an insult, not only because the intention

was to insult but also and especially because every occurrence of the word

abtar was understood to entail a natural diminution of status. It was not

the concept of the abtar that was rethought but the will to revenge that

threw it back, as it stood, onto the perpetrator, who was not logically ex-

posed to it. The logical impasse expressed in the surah of al-Kauthar did

not merely signify an original failure at acquiring a passive audience in the

manner provided for the pre-Islamic poets. It also motivated a conscious

and elaborate drive to ascertain a proper audience as a precondition of prophethood rather than as a possible outcome of it.

Thus for three years after the first revelation, Muhammad preached

the early, largely cosmological segments of the new religion “secretly.” A

small constituency began to take shape, which not only confirmed for

Muhammad the seriousness of his mission but also added to his confu-

sion, as it demanded of him further elaborations on what Allah’s inten-

tions were beyond vaguely introducing himself and assigning an earthly

carrier of his message. The recruitment of the early followers apparently followed no specific social or economic pattern. The earliest Sahabah

(companions) included the respected affluent merchants Abi Bakr and




‘Uthman Ibn ‘Affan, the slave Bilal the Abyssinian, the austere Bedouin

Abi Dharr al-Ghafary, Muhammad’s adopted ex-mawla (slave) Zaid Ibn

Haritha, and members of Muhammad’s close family, namely, his wife

Khadija and his adopted nephew ‘Ali, who were reportedly recruited after

a hanifi endorsement by Waraqah Ibn Nawfal. The diversity of the origi-

nal base, though not signifying a challenge to traditional clan bonds, did

nonetheless give rise to a new method of looking that detected the lack of

spiritual content in traditional social bonds.

Beyond that small social enclave, open propagation later revealed the

practical difficulty of constructing a prophetic audience, mostly because

Arab societies that lived in or frequented Mecca during the pilgrimage

and suq (marketplace) season had different reasons for rejecting specificclaims to prophethood, even when they entertained some notion of its

anticipation. The Bedouins showed the least interest in Islam, even

when Muhammad used overt tribal appeals in approaching them.12 The

Bedouins, however, barely respected theological orders, especially abstract

ones. Other Bedouins understood Muhammad’s approach as an invita-

tion to join an alliance to conquer other territories, and they subsequently

offered their help on the condition that after “Allah gives you power over

those who deny you,” they would inherit sovereignty. They very explicitly

told him that they would not sacrifice their lives for something as trivial as

an Allah unless that Allah allowed them a privileged status among the

Arabs after the victory of Islam.13 Only then would they be ready to follow

a prophet, be it Muhammad or anyone else.

The naked way in which the Bedouins spelled out their tribal condi-

tions caused great tactical and even strategic difficulties for the emerging

Islamic evangel, even though it failed to detour the development of hiscosmology in a lasting way. In a characteristic gesture, the leader of the

later nomadic rebellion, the aforementioned Musaylimah, reportedly used

a strictly tribal tone in his correspondence with Muhammad shortly be-

fore the latter’s death, demonstrating thereby that the newly consolidated

religion still left almost no trace of an impact on nomadic political percep-

tions of the world. Musaylimah reportedly wrote a letter to Muhammad

offering the following compromise: “From Musaylimah, messenger of

Allah, to Muhammad, messenger of Allah: Peace be upon you; I have beendesignated to share the matter [prophethood] with you, and been told that

half of the land is rightly ours and half is Quraysh’s, even though the




Quraysh are transgressors.” To which Muhammad reportedly replied:

“From Muhammad, the messenger of Allah, to Musaylimah, the liar: Peace

be upon he who follows the true guidance; the land belongs to Allah, Who

passes it on to whomever He wills among His worshippers.”14

Thus, from the perspective of Musaylimah and his followers, the no-

tion of prophethood did not necessarily presuppose a deposition of a di-

vine task in a unique individual instance. It did, however, correspond to

claims to political authority in a more open manner than sedentary com-

munities were ever willing to entertain. Thus, the unreliability of the no-

madic audience was registered clearly in many passages in the Qur’an,

such as this one: “The Arabs of the desert declare: ‘We are true believers.’

Say: ‘Believers you are not.’ Rather say: ‘We profess Islam,’ for faith has not yet found its way into your hearts.”15

In this respect, the distinction is made between two acceptable declara-

tions of allegiance,“Islam” being only one—and the weaker one at that—

of the two. In the above aya (Qur’anic verse), the word “Islam” is used in

the literal sense of submission (to peace, to Allah) rather than in the sense

of active undertaking of diverse and more detailed practices encumbent

upon faith. This “offer,” which is made in the Qur’an only to Arab nomads

and to no one else,16 signified the agony of a tactical decision that had to

be made with communities that were themselves offering practical al-

liances but were unwilling to submit to continuous command or central

supervision.

Muhammad’s dismal failure to construct a prophetic audience in

Mecca and among the Bedouins contrasted sharply with his decisive suc-

cess in Yathrib (later Medina), where, significantly, the audience consti-

tuted itself largely in the absence of the prophet. According to traditionalIslamic accounts, the Islamicization of the Yathribites began during one

pilgrimage season when, among the flood of visiting peninsular Arabs,

the busy Muhammad finally stumbled upon a band of Khazrajites of

Yathrib, from whom “Allah willed good to come.” According to the

sources, the half dozen men went back to their town to tell their people of

the new prophet in the land. They returned to Mecca during the next pil-

grimage season, twice as many in number and with a broader represen-

tation and more dedication, promising loyalty to Islam. By the timeMuhammad and his followers left Mecca to go to Medina during the hijra

(migration), most of the people of the city had already been Islamicized.




This accomplishment was as decisive as it is illustrative of the un-

intended course through which the prophetic audience coalesced.As such,

it requires a brief pause to explore its grounds. In comparison to Mecca,

Yathrib was less heavily involved in the trade economy, although it played

a part in it. Its society, which consisted of periodically warring tribes (Aus,

Khazraj, Jews) living behind fortifications, revealed more visible fissures

than Mecca’s. And as an overall sedentary unit, it was much closer than

Mecca to nomadism. Those conditions offered an order of reception to

Islam that was free from some of the restrictions that Mecca had to im-

pose on new theological contributions. In Mecca, the monotheistic Allah

lacked one major factor, namely, a socially sanctioned means of dissemi-

nation; Mecca’s most emphatic rejection addressed not the notion of amonotheistic Allah as much as Muhammad’s unsolicited prophethood.

In other words, it rejected the uncustomary notion of boundless authority

for a fellow citizen. In Yathrib, such an insurmountable barrier of social

communication did not exist, for Muhammad was not a regular mem-

ber of its society. Most of the Yathribites saw Muhammad for the first time

only after they had already joined Islam. In his absence, he enjoyed an

aloofness second only to Allah’s. Unlike the Meccans, Yathribites never ex-

perienced the perfectly human prophet “eating and walking about the mar-

ket squares”—as the Qur’an registered Meccan responses to Muhammad’s

prophetic claim—before they had already committed themselves to the

faith. Faith, in this sense, indicates just this accomplishment: An audience

is so firmly constituted in the absence of the source of its dissemination

that when the human features of the prophet appear in the distance,

prophethood as an empirically discernible notion will have forsaken the

precondition of miraculous and credentializing presentation. An audi-ence so constituted could be counted upon not to disperse thereafter.

The constitution of this audience, however, was pathbreaking in an-

other respect. Traditional sources mention two successive agreements

(bay‘ah) between Muhammad and Yathribite delegations, the second of

which was to instigate his migration to the town. In the first, Muhammad

delegated a trusted Meccan follower, Mus‘ab Ibn ‘Umair, to teach the ele-

ments of Islam to the Yathribites. The main traditional sources also point

out that it was the Yathribites themselves who asked Muhammad to sendan outsider to regulate their affairs, as the long history of infighting among

them had left them without a local arbitrator who had not been tarnished




by the spillover of tribal wars.17 This episode is greatly reminiscent of

the dynamics that had preceded the commencement of the monarchical

experiment among Kinda tribes almost a century before in the central

peninsula. In that case, the distant king of Yemen was approached to as-

sign an outsider to arbitrate the increasing disputes in Najd. In this case,

the same experiment addressed antagonistic sedentary tribes, which could

be controlled more effectively than the widely dispersed nomadic follow-

ing of Kinda could be controlled by its kings. Moreover, this experiment

was now buttressed by an ontotheology and underwritten by an Allah de-

manding to be feared.

The preaching of Islam through a representative of an absentee prophet,

rather than by the prophet himself, proved to be an astonishing success.Unlike in Mecca, Muhammad was not at hand and so could not be con-

tinuously implored to produce convincing prophetic credentials. The

knowledge that there was a prophet in the land, his detached remoteness,

his anticipation, and his instrumental role as a needed arbitrator of con-

flicts encumbent upon sedentarization—all provided a dialectical scene

through which the audience coalesced. Furthermore, Yathrib had little

affinity with Mecca’s need to populate the haram (sanctuary) with stones

and engulf them with spirituality, which protected and enhanced its mag-

netic economic role in the peninsula. Yathrib was not the center of either

the suq route or the pilgrimage. Like many non-Meccan Arabs, the

Yathribites had no great dedication to the idols. And the presence of a

large Jewish community in Yathrib and in neighboring towns, such as

Khaibar, introduced newly sedentarized Bedouins to a different spiritual

order, one centered on an abstract God.

Thus, when Islam was introduced to the semi-Bedouin, non-JewishYathribites, it progressed among them very smoothly, as it had to demol-

ish nothing in its way. There were no deeply held beliefs against the thrust

of its message. But even at that early stage of its introduction to Yathrib,

Islam had more to offer its people than a pure ontology: It used the force

of Allah to regulate a social life that could no longer afford the heritage of

some aspects of the old Bedouin economy, namely, intertribal raids. In the

following year, the delegation of the Muslim Yathribites in Mecca, who

came to be known in Islamic history as the Ansar (Backers),concurred withMuhammad on the following conditions: that they worship none but Allah;

that they refrain from stealing, adultery, infanticide, and propagating




falsehoods; and that they obey Muhammad insofar as his teachings

involved social benevolence (ma‘ruf ). In return, Muhammad promised

them paradise if they followed their part of the agreement. If they did not,

they could expect punishment that was not necessarily certain: Allah

could either absolve them of the oath if they so wished by hardening

their present life, or he could merely make them wait until the Day of

Judgment, when he might forgive them just as well.18 It was not a bad

deal. It spelled out a gradual intrusion into the life of two antagonistic

tribes of a set of beliefs and a system of authority that ordained that from

that point on, they would submit to Allah rather than to one another.

The second agreement was a historical landmark. Its conditions be-

trayed a synthesis between the old worldview and the revealed pieces of the new ontotheology, between tribal identity and a new form of trans-

tribal unity, between the existent social conditions in Yathrib and the

ideals of the prophet and his Meccan followers. In addition, it set in mo-

tion the Muslims’ total break with the Mecca of the past, where their

movement had been stagnating for years: Shortly afterward, they left for

Yathrib en masse in what became known as the hijra.

The traditional historical sources narrate the story of the second pact

as follows: More than seventy of the Ansar came to Mecca to meet

Muhammad during the pilgrimage season. He went to them accom-

panied by his non-Muslim uncle al-‘Abbas Ibn ‘Abd al-Muttaleb, who

was the first to speak at the meeting. The uncle began his speech by an-

nouncing to the Ansar that Muhammad was enjoying an honorable un-

assailability in Mecca because his clan protected him. However, the mes-

senger of Allah was prepared to abandon that luxury and join the Ansar

in their dwellings. Al-‘Abbas concluded by warning the Ansar to abandonMuhammad and his teachings at that moment if they had the slightest

doubt about their dedication to his protection once he moved to their ter-

ritories. The immediate readiness expressed by the Ansar led Muhammad

to finally proclaim his unity with them in a strict tribal manner, signaling

a departure from the theological aloofness through which Islam had been

proclaimed up until that moment.19

This prophetic audience continued to enjoy a certain distance from the

prophet even after the hijra. Muhammad refrained from ruling in Medinadirectly, delegating authority instead to twelve nuqaba’ (keepers, overseers)

selected by the Khazraj and the Aus to guarantee the pact. The naqibs were




told that they were to account for their people (the Ansar ) following the

example of Jesus’s disciples, while the prophet would account for his own

people, meaning the Meccan Muslims who migrated to Medina (the

Muhajirun). This division, which was to leave its imprint on later devel-

opments, answered the question of the audience for God’s message by

contouring such an audience along earthly social structures, which the

phenomenon of prophethood was in the process of remodeling.

constitution of sagehood: knowledge, foreknowledge

Recluse Quest

According to traditional accounts, Muhammad’s first revelation came

during one of his extended seclusions in the mountain terrain around

Mecca. The first phrases to be revealed of the holy book emphasized little

other than the modality of transmitting the forthcoming knowledge:

“Recite in the name of your Lord who created—created man from clots of

blood. . . . Recite, for Your Lord is the Most Bountiful One, who by the pen

taught man what he did not know.”20 Sacred knowledge is an outcome of

a piecemeal process of passive recitation. As such, it must be soughtthrough ritual purification, signified in this case by Muhammad’s recur-

rent seclusions away from the perils of ordinary society for many years.

The outcome of this process is a particular kind of knowledge, available

not through ordinary pedagogical channels but, rather, through a reclu-

sive quest. The search itself, unlike the knowledge it was to produce, was a

socially sanctioned practice. A story from the tradition tells that one day

Muhammad, along with his young nephew, were discovered practicing a

strange form of worship by the nephew’s father, who, while declining the

invitation to join their quest, did not object to it either. For the quest itself

did not threaten the established order.21

The intensity of the seclusion is also confirmed by many other early

Qur’anic statements, which instruct that meditation should be performed

at night, away from the clamor of the ordinary society of the daytime.22

Sleeping, on the other hand, was a possible route to seclusion insofar as it

protected the prophet from the temptations of sin, which, according tothe traditional narrative, reared its head twice during his youth.23 This

freedom from sin is not only an outcome of a determined reclusive quest




for knowledge but, moreover, a symptom of a strong denigration of mor-

tal society. The first signs of prophecy, as Muhammad was to recount

many years later, involved an encounter during a lonely stroll in the

wilderness with two angels, who proceeded to ascertain whether he was

indeed the promised one. The verification procedure they employed in-

volved weighing him against one man, then ten, then a hundred, then a

thousand, only to find him tipping the scale consistently. They concluded

that he was indeed the promised one, who would still tip the balance even

against his entire nation.24

This procedure is itself interesting because it presupposes the social

embeddedness of the seclusion itself; Muhammad is judged on the basis

of a comparison with other ordinary mortals from his own nation ratherthan on the basis of self-referencing attributes. This social comparability

is an outcome of the seclusion process; the spatiotemporal sanctuaries

from this world—the cave and the night—allow a discourse of world de-

nunciation to take form, but in some cases they also prepare for the reinte-

gration of an exhausted soul back into society as a reformer who possess-

es knowledge gathered from the wilderness outside. In Muhammad’s case,

the periodic recurrence of time of reckoning with ordinary social life (for

example, dawn) does not signify the end of the reclusive quest; as the time

of revelation nears, Muhammad experiences visions as powerful as the

sudden break of the dawn ( falaq s-subh) itself.25 At such a point, the reclu-

sive quest is over. The knowledge accumulating through the time-space

dimensions of seclusion begins to encroach upon the time-space of soci-

ety. The dawn is reminiscent no longer of the end of the quest but, rather,

of its success.

The reclusive quest is one model of knowledge transmission that oper-ates according to particular dynamic. In the pre-Islamic ode of ‘Antara—

an ex-slave who exists on the margins of social belonging—we find a

comparable process of reflection, which renders a different order of

knowledge nonetheless. At an early point in the ode, ‘Antara hears a voice

that instigates a particular quest, a departure from his regular discourse of

love and heroism. Whereas in the case of Muhammad the voice that com-

mands him to “recite” comes only at the conclusion of the reclusive quest,

the voice for ‘Antara reverberates at the outset and induces a movementtoward its point of origination. That unknown point exists in a region

distinct from the anonymity of a nature in which this nomad travels.




which the ode opens has been frustrated, the project of standing in the

face of time and molding it to one’s own end has been thoroughly shat-

tered. And to complement the degeneration, the gnostic, revelatory proj-

ect announces in couplet 19 its complete surrender to the unknowabilities

not only of the future but of the present as well. This sequence ends on

that note. Nothing more is added to the void, the region of ignorance,

lying one step ahead, and from then on extending to the limits of sight.

Thereafter, the invitation to respond to the invasion of signs and voices

by a reclusive quest is pushed to the background, as a more clearly politi-

cal and communal project, to which the ode is ultimately oriented, takes

over.

Knowledge and Prophetic Credentials

Unlike the sage, the prophet is sent by God. His knowledge comes from

God, without whom the prophet-to-be remains simply another illiterate

member of the tribe. In fact, even his selection as a prophet flows not

from any specific prior credentials or personal qualities but simply from

God’s right to make arbitrary selections.26 Furthermore, Muhammad’s re-

lationship to the deity is largely passive, nondialogical, and prone to fear.

The prophet does not actively seek God and his knowledge but, rather, is

forced to absorb divine instructions as an unsolicited reward for his quest.

The sira emphasizes the extreme horror and helplessness that engulfed

Muhammad during the early episodes of revelation: He frequently fell to

his knees, pleaded with his wife, Khadija, to cover and hide him, and even

contemplated suicide. Divine knowledge, which the prophet was to propa-

gate, gradually took the form and style of what eventually became known

as the Qur’an. As “knowledge,” this corpus required the employment of particular codes and insignia and also the endowment of its vehicle—the

prophet—with the requisite credentials.

Self-enclosed systems of knowledge require unique codes that set them

apart. The code, however, does not simply consist of linguistic forms

through which the knowledge can be heard distinctly. The speaker must

seek and find a location of authority from which to speak. The distinct

codes recorded in pre-Islamic poetry all came with tales that also described

the status, trials, and tribulations of their speakers. Zuhair’s biography, forinstance, introduces him as an “organic intellectual” (in the Gramscian

sense), as a sage who spoke from within the tribe. One crucial background




for his wisdom consisted of his awareness—akin to Muhammad’s—of a

lack of an instrumental authority that could enforce the code of morals

and manners outlined in his ode. There were other speakers, needless to

say, who could also lay a claim to a privileged speaking position from

which to dispense wisdom but who were less traumatized than Zuhair by

the dilemma of instrumentality. ‘Amru Ibn Kalthum, who personified the

position of a poet-leader, offered a modality of code transmission that

contrasted sharply with Muhammad’s trials, which exhibited—at least in

Mecca—the agony of the unenforceability encountered in Zuhair’s case.

‘Amru’s ode includes some intriguing viewpoints incumbent upon the

particularity of his belonging, namely, to a society in which the author of a

“legitimate” code of knowledge (the poet) also happens to be entrustedwith instrumental authority.

‘Amru’s speech not only defies the tradition of standing at the ruins but

actually attempts to preempt their formation. His speech preceding the

traditional contemplation of the ruins, lacking in any foundation in the

tradition, compensates by furnishing an encyclopedic record of things

past instead of contending with the loss imprinted on the reality of al-

ready formed traces. As couplet 8 has it, the function of this encyclopedic

composition is “to be certain,” “to tell that which is sure knowledge,” “to

be told of that which is sure knowledge.” The speaking leader, therefore, is

himself the instrument of certitude that has eluded Zuhair so frustrat-

ingly. Rather than fruitlessly mourning a loss, ‘Amru preempts its occur-

rence by assessing its real value. The record, thus, evaluates what had

elapsed and what, on the basis of what is known from what had elapsed,

could be seen to be following suit. At a certain level, the act of recording

involves a desire to anticipate the future or, more pointedly, to premournthe loss that is to occur so that, when it lands with its full ferocity, one

could endure it by claiming to have already experienced it.

It is this preexperience that projects into the personality of the leader

an element of foreknowledge. A leader must know and must have antici-

pated the way things are from an earlier point of commencement. So he

has to choose a point of beginning earlier than all possible others: Stand-

ing at dawn, with which his ode begins, replaces standing at the ruins. In

other words, the replacement of a spatial halting by a temporal genesis pre-pares the leader to act to preempt the work of nature rather than waiting

for nature to present its bill. Time is not to run its natural course but is to




be made by the author. He shall decide the course for the rest of the day,

rather than wait for the traces to be formed for him by the natural flow of

time. When the inevitable happens, and the lover’s tribe begins its depar-

ture, an emphatic plea registers a protest rather than a strict lamentation:

“Pause, and we’ll ask you whether you caused this rapture / the wrench

being so near, or to betray the trusty” (c. 8). The questioning mode re-

places the customary expression of sorrow at the site of the ruins: A leader

wonders where others weep.

From the vantage point of conscious power, the reality of pain is trans-

formed into a questioning of its existence. Power is the capacity to post-

pone loss indefinitely. If the questioning mode is to ever dissolve into an

admittance of the loss, the wreckage, the break, the absurdity of furtherquestioning, it would find itself confronted with this lack of control,

which the concept of “treason” alluded to earlier brings to the fore in the

most challenging way; for the leader himself is defined by the existence of

an “order,” whose undermining defines treason. On the other hand, a

leader is himself defined by the possibility of treason: As an eternal play of

opposites, power is at the same time the susceptibility to subversion.

Prophetic knowledge, on the other hand, is the foreknowledge of God.

Unlike the experience of instrumental (tribal) authority, the prophetic ex-

perience is such only because the formula of knowledge/foreknowledge is

distributed to different agencies rather than condensed at the one locus

from which discourse emanates. The very first word of the Qur’an was

the command to recite, repeat, or read (iqra’ ) an already formulated yet

humanly unknown wisdom. In this fashion, the prophet’s legitimacy is

premised precisely on his lack of contribution to the discovery of prophet-

hood. The question of reason becomes subordinate to the demonstrationof will: Muhammad has not sought the divine; rather, the divine surprised

the contemplative, ordinary wanderer along the road and told him that

from then on, the relationship between his self and the divine was to be

that of repetition. Muhammad was taught from the beginning that the

being of a prophet meant neither subjective responsibility for a mission

nor a speculative rendition of God’s instructions but a strict verbal reitera-

tion of God’s exact words. The anticipation of prophethood, and subse-

quently of the revelation of the stored foreknowledge, furnishes in itself areadiness to repeat. Reportedly, the prophet’s first response to the com-

mand was not “why recite?” but “recite what?” The anticipation instigates




a search for signs of the divine’s presence in and communication to the

world. The fact that the divine’s first order of business is the transmission

of an already formulated body of instructions rather than self-justification

indicates, among other things, the prior establishment of the idea of the

divine itself as a distinct storehouse of knowledge, communicated to

the world only through words whose source cannot be seen.27 Even the

prophet himself is one step removed from the ultimate source, since the

Qur’an is revealed through an intermediary, the archangel Gabriel. Allah

is not directly involved even in transmitting his own religion. When Allah

is situated above the medium carrying his own words, he registers thereby

the validity of the words on the basis of the impossibility of comprehend-

ing their source.28

Since the only experience of the divine that could possibly be transmit-

ted to society is his utterances, such utterances must then stand for the

idea of the divine in its entirety. But since one of the qualities of the new

conception of the divine is his unapproachability, the utterances must

then also stand for that which cannot be expressed. Therefore, the first

experiment with a solution to such a dilemma dictated that neither the

utterances nor the prophetic experience of receiving them can find a re-

semblance in the world. The unapproachable divine cannot appear in an

approachable format. The format consisted for the most part of the quasi-

poetic tradition of rhymed utterances (saja‘ ), which was known long be-

fore Muhammad’s time. The Qur’an expanded the range of topics ex-

pressed through saja‘, and in many instances it registered its pride in its

unmatchability on literary grounds.29 Such an extensive use of a compara-

tively little used literary medium—which occurred less in sage discourse

than did poetry—liberated the Qur’an from having to compete in themuch more contested and regulated literary medium of poetry. It added

an aesthetic dimension of authenticity that was crucial for the reception

of the text without having to dilute its sanctity by reverting to more popu-

lar, thus more profane, means for the dissemination of ideas. The Qur’an

openly resorted to glorifying its own literariness as a sufficient material

evidence for the authenticity of prophethood in the land.30

In Meccan society, however, the crisis of prophethood was generated not

so much around Qur’anic discourse as around Muhammad’s own cre-dentials. Muhammad had no instrumental authority until his migration

to Medina, had no inherited distinct clan honors, and subsequently had




no traditional entitlement to ideological or spiritual positions of leader-

ship. Thus, for the first seven or eight years of preaching, Muhammad ac-

complished no significant breakthrough in Mecca. His followers contin-

ued to comprise a small minority, and major elements of his teachings,

like the resurrection of the body, were openly ridiculed.31 Many of his

significant followers had to migrate to Abyssinia for a second time, and

many of those who stayed behind recanted, whether because of social

pressure or dwindling enthusiasm. The less powerful or wealthy believers

found themselves bearing the brunt of harassment, and only those who

enjoyed the protection of recognized clans, including Muhammad him-

self, could debate the rest of the community without fear of repercus-

sions. Muhammad was pressed hard to produce miraculous propheticcredentials, but the aloof Allah consistently frustrated him. Ultimately, he

had nothing other than the Qur’an to show, but even that hitherto unique

form eventually became just another background for literary competition

among the poets and storytellers, who were eager to emulate it.32

Thus, though for the prophet the constitution of prophethood was

structured entirely around discourse, the earthly community to which he

ultimately belonged privileged other credentials, namely, preordained

tribal prominence. It was a question of entitlement to embody tribal des-

tiny, a theme whose most illustrious celebrant in pre-Islamic discourse

is ‘Amru Ibn Kalthum. Unlike Muhammad or other poets (for example,

Zuhair, Labid, Tarafa, Imru’ l-Qays), ‘Amru never addresses his own kin-

folk; rather, he addresses their enemies on their behalf. After a brief sub-

mergence into the mist of history, love, dawn, wine, transformations, and

sorrows, the bulk of ‘Amru’s poem is dedicated to addressing the major

nemesis of the tribe, the king of al-Hira, all the way to the end of the ode.This registers a remarkable consistency in ancient poetry, which is main-

tained by virtue of the stability of the two sides of the communicative

scene. This rare thematic stability, which the Qur’an itself did not begin to

attain until its Medinian period, flows from a predicament similar to that

of the prophet in Medina: A thematic consistency here is directly related

to confrontational imperatives.

Similarly, ‘Amru’s addressee is less likely to leave, to slip away as easily

as a lover, whose theme adorns earlier segments of the ode. The king of al-Hira, much like Mecca as seen from the perspective of the Medinian

Qur’an, is a threat, an enemy, an antithesis, a traitor to the project for




harmony, and thus could be counted upon to inform the entire dis-

course, disappearing only after the account has been settled. The enemy

is a less elusive addressee, a nonmirage. It is an existing, known quality, a

more stable form of concreteness than the vanished prehistory alluded to

by the ruinous site or the lost prophetic traditions, which respectively in-

stigate the nomadic ode and the sedentary gnosis. In both cases, scenes of

animosity and confrontation stabilize the flow of“knowledge” and speech,

where “to tell” or “to inform” (the adversary, infidels) are formulas that

often begin and are interspersed through many couplets and ayat. In the

case of ‘Amru, this kind of knowledge flows from an instrumental au-

thority and is delivered on behalf of the tribe, whereas in the case of the

Qur’an it is provided to the tribe for the sake of saving it from itself.Instrumental authority—at least in Muhammad’s case—was only a

later concern, born out of the failure of knowledge in itself to incite in the

larger community a similitude of the recitational response, which molded

Muhammad’s prophetic career from its onset. The later shift in emphasis

in the direction of attaining instrumental authority navigated through be-

havioral models that different heroic pre-Islamic poets revisited, notably

‘Antara and ‘Amru. To simplify the matter,‘Amru is a poet-hero-leader and,

as such, a discursive prototype of the later Muhammad. ‘Antara is a poet-

hero-lover and, as such, a prototype of the early Muhammad. In the case of

‘Antara, the substitution of the lover for the leader reorients the notion of

heroism,and the poetic discourse addresses the notion of knowledge with-

out the traps incumbent upon leadership. To be sure, the substitution

makes the scenes of confrontation less stable.As a prototype, ‘Antara’s case

shows that the lover shall never become a leader; as a freed slave, ‘Antara is

guaranteed to remain an outsider to the blood genealogy—an indispens-able criterion for eminence—in a manner paralleling Muhammad’s pre-

dicament of lacking tribally recognized criteria for prominence.

‘Antara’s is an ode of a legendarily long time of war (the same one that

we have seen problematized in Zuhair’s ode). Yet war here is but one

more of the conditions of life. It has been going on for many years; it has

become natural. And so the discourse finds little trouble in interrupting

the battle scene with imageries of love, yearning, tranquillity, reflection:

moments of lull, soon to be shattered by a resumption of fighting. Con-flict and disharmony are not temporary conditions to be stamped out

systematically, as sedentary societies thought of them, but simply other




ordinary facets of life. The dialectic operating between struggle and tran-

quil reflection is not wholly arbitrary; rather, it is an operation through

which proper credentials become evident for all to see:

Praise me therefore for the things you know of me; for Iam easy to get on with, provided I’m not wronged. (c. 36)

“Praise me . . . for the things you know of me.” Not for the things I am

about to tell you, nor for the sake of this tribal togetherness in which we

are bonded, nor for what I do not manifestly possess. Praise me, rather,

for the things you know: You already possess the knowledge that enables

you to perform the act of praising. The praise is here an outcome of fore-

told knowledge. Since you already know, therefore I am known. I am not asubject tormented by the task of making myself known; no, I have myself

disappeared as an actor on behalf of the self: I have been made known.

And to be so naturally made known means that I shall not be asking the

praise from a stranger. My strangeness, which itself defines the stranger in

the other, had already been erased by this body of knowledge about me,

which seems to have disseminated in the land.

On the other hand, you do not know me yet. I must make myself

known with my own speech. My self-description shall deliver me to you.

A stranger could not have possibly been so readily made known, at least

not in a way that is naturally conducive of unmitigated praise. Now it is

time to reappear, as though a cataclysm, to effect a disappearance once

and for all. Here, I am throwing at your feet my unparalleled heroism. In

its place I would like words: just that praise which alone would allow me

not to be with you, but with the anonymity of the tribe, to wander, as-

sured that while away, I am already deposited with you as this value, guar-anteed by your words to survive as such, irrespective of my location in the

vast land, where I could perish and never return.

So, who am I? On the one hand, I’m easily summarizable, “for I am

easy to get on with, provided I’m not wronged.” On the other hand, now

as a hero, I am still easily summarizable, for “if I am wronged, then

the wrong I do is harsh indeed / bitter to the palate as the tang of the colo-

cynth” (c. 37). I am a reactive but naturally dormant hero. That is, in

essence, all of me, or, in other words, all of me that my speech was re-quired to deliver. The rest, as you know, is known. My contribution was to

make known my performance in a scene of confrontation, and now that




all unknowns are thereby rectified, I am prepared to leave, with the confi-

dence that my own speech, when combined with the already known, shall

redeem me against all danger.

Like this hero-lover, the prophet is not intended to be an empirical

person spending a great deal of time and energy to make known that

which must have been so, or even to defend his face, subjective being, and

entitlement to spiritual leadership. The Qur’an, especially the Meccan

Qur’an, explicitly allocates to Muhammad little more than the role of a

bearer of good news and warnings. The crisis of prophetic entitlement in

a tangible community, however, and unlike ‘Antara’s affair, made the trials

of subjecthood all but unavoidable. In ‘Antara’s case, by contrast, one can

recognize a remarkable ease of transition, engendered by the preentrust-ment of all knowledge about the hero unto the tribe and the lover. Thus

he easily leaves a well-lit scene, going off to drink wine, and, after linger-

ing there for a while (c. 38–41), he departs the inn only after reminding

the audience that the loved one already “knows” unmentioned qualities,

which were on the verge of being spelled out but are now left unsaid for

the sake of more important business (couplet 41 ends the wine scene with

“. . . my qualities and my nobility being as you have known them”).

The need of such a hero to speak, however, stems from a condition of

living in which one encounters continuous alterity, self-defense needs,

and a sense of unfreedom that his distant objects of desire bring to the

fore. Such forces always pose for him, therefore, the question of identity.

Within a social hierarchy attentive to (real or imagined) blood genealo-

gies, identity was an issue of unalterable naturalness and thus was not an

object for plain and direct meditation. Under such circumstances, iden-

tity, to the extent that certain events reallocate the right of its thinkingto the self, is an enigmatic feeling of a relation to the self and society

that must be thought anew, since the past archive of the tribe offers it

no reference point. At this juncture, discourses of individual identity and

entitlement—‘Antara’s as well as Muhammad’s—belabor experimentation

and add layers of sameness, for they are attempting to capture a feeling for

which no word was yet in existence.

In ‘Antara’s case, the enigma is assaulted, circumvented, discursively al-

tered, or relegated to the domain of the “already known.” His ode pointsthis out most clearly in the sequence in which he describes his drinking

habits. For wine causes a shift in identity; it causes an other side to appear,




a less controllable side, a hint at a difference lurking within. It seems neces-

sary for ‘Antara, therefore, to deny the transformation: Drunk or sober, he

is the same moral entity: generous, honorable,bountiful,noble,or of other-

wise “known”qualities (c. 40–41). In a similar gesture, in some interesting

early passages the Qur’an offered the faithful in heaven a special kind of

wine, distinct in that it caused no shift in personality and no lapse in rea-

son.33 The fact that wine was eventually prohibited in this world points to

the need for the faithful to possess psychic stability, since after the faith

there would be no reason to change one’s identity and temperament.

In the case of ‘Antara, the resilience of identity, belabored in the con-

text of wine consumption, also stabilizes in one location a number of be-

haviors that together inaugurate an unshakable, unique character. Fromthe vantage point of this privileged, stable position, change could be fore-

seen and resisted, whereas identity endures a quest after a phenomenal

unity preservable in the economy of a summarily proclaimable rendition.

The search is after a word that could deliver the enormous entirety of a

hero-poet-lover (in addition to other secondarisms), a word that would

preserve the reservoir of experiences that had formed the identity, so that

the subject could keep on moving, beyond them, into the yet to be“known.” This word, in other words, is that verdict that is to settle the

account with the prehistory of the speaker. And in the preinscriptional era

conditioned by a normativity of movement, such a search, unlike the

highly referenced history that was to follow, was indeed arduous. To find a

verdict on experience was a matter of chasing a smell of possibilities ema-

nating from a variety of directions rather than simply choosing from the

classified givens of an ideological tableaux.

Under prophetic conditions, by contrast, the “word” became the end-

less project inaugurated by the divine command to recite. Rather than

delivering exactly that word that the command of recitation implies,

Qur’anic discourse postpones the delivery a little further: “Recite in the

name of your Lord, Who . . .” Thus, as in the case of the nomadic poet,

the prophetic quest inaugurates a movement that, unlike the nomad’s, is

fixed from the beginning on a single source of voice. In either case, the

promised identity is indefinitely postponed as a dynamic discourse beginsto unfold. The duality of prophet/community in the case of Muhammad

and hero/lover in the case of ‘Antara provide audiences against whose




backdrop the identity of the speaker is continually adjusted and made

known.

In the case of ‘Antara, the story of heroism concerns the warrior’s per-

formance in war. Yet the story must in some way be already known, even

before the heroic identity is confirmed by its retelling. The audience’s

presence is the first item to be ascertained here: “I could advise you,

daughter of Malik, to ask the [horses] . . .” (c. 44). Heroism, indeed, war it-

self, is a performance for an audience. And it is especially so in this case,

where concerns of communal defense, even the tribe itself, are hardly

mentioned. Neither is the “daughter of Malik” subject to any discernible

threat. She is there to listen to another alteration of moments of this dual-

ity of knowns and unknowns, a cycle that is meant to introduce the fighterin his full heroic bloom, his collected history of victories, his totalization

as an active identity. Thus, she is now to be told, in a rather confounding

mode of speaking, of what she is yet to know.34 This knowledge, which in

any case is to be provided by a witness (c. 47: “Those who were present at

the engagement will acquaint you . . .”), ushers in the hero’s acquisition of

an identity (unique, unified, totalized, certain, confining, confident). Such

shall be the identity through which this speaker would enter history and

last in it forever.

Thus, we have a scene of telling stabilized, whereby the audience is clari-

fied, and the warrior moves on, confident of the naturalism of a mode of

telling that no longer requires him to halt and address the audience in the

first person. The constructed and stabilized scene will allow him to be de-

scribed by the witnesses. Thus, the very next scene finds him moving, as

though he had been moving all along, rather than recommencing after a

rest: “for I’m [still] on the saddle of a strong swimmer” (c. 45). He plungesinto enemy territory. A great war is to ensue. Before the enormous cloud

of dust and the noise of colliding armories erases all else from view, the

warrior reemerges and addresses the lover for one last time, “informing”

her—still by way of a witness—of one important detail, lest she misinter-

pret the battle:

Those who were present at the engagement will aquaint you

how I plunge into battle, but abstain at the booty-sharing. (c. 47)

This mode of fighting is different from the normal and regular nomadic

raid (ghazw ): A hero is to be detached from such trivialities. Once an




audience is formed and for which it is performed, the battle assumes a dif-

ferent moral structure. The socioeconomy of the ghazw situation required

no particular witness, order, or report. The war to be witnessed here is

waged in the closed circuit of audience-identity: Identity here is a matter

of acknowledgment by the audience, and the audience ensures that the

performance does not deviate from the behaviors and codes required for

an entitlement to an identity. Thus ‘Antara is aloof to the common

economies of the situation and abstains from sharing in the booty, which

is made known by the witnesses. An item of knowledge which ought to have

been “already known” is that which is delivered by a witness, not by the

hero. Like the prophet, what is not to be given through his own voice is

a general description of his own qualities and habits. That, in general, isassumed to be known. That is, he already possesses the requirements of

the claimed identity that the audience presumably anticipates. In their

general capacities, the hero and the prophet must be already known. Thus

the discourse emanating from such identities addresses only further de-

tails: As a known commodity, the hero tells in the first person only those

details, specifics, twists, and variations of a more stable and general phe-

nomenon that, in its larger form, is already namable as ‘Antara and is

therefore foretold.

In a similar vein, the qualities of the anticipated prophet are already

foretold in the myriad of stories of prior apostles sent to the world by the

same God. The Qur’an thus spends a great deal of time on retelling such

stories rather than on defending and explaining Muhammad’s character

and actions. Moreover, such tales are often told not as original stories but

as parables, whereby Qur’anic discourse quickly moves on to drawing

conclusions from them, assuming that their substance is already known,that prophethood as a general identity is already prefigured in the land,

and that the dilemmas it faces are historically recurrent rather than spe-

cific to Muhammad’s case.

The added element in Muhammad’s case, which was to be of important

ramifications for the ethical dimension of prophethood, consisted of a set

of known general life conditions condensed in Muhammad’s own iden-

tity. In an early surah, the prophet is made aware of the fact that his role in

society consists of reproducing his relationship to Allah. In the brief surahof ad-Duha (Qur’an 93), the prophet is told that as Allah had sheltered the

orphaned Muhammad, the latter shall oppress no orphan; that as Allah




had guided the imperfect Muhammad, the latter shall respect everyone

who seeks help; that as Allah had enriched the poor Muhammad, the latter

shall proclaim the generosity of the former. These acts of reproduction of

divine goodness parallel the formulation of the project of prophethood as

a recitation of divine words. But in deeds—as opposed to the case of

words—the prophet is never allowed to exactly reproduce the work of the

transcendental deity, whose actions must keep a respectable distance from

those of mortals, just as his nature must transcend their imagination. At

that early stage of prophethood’s formation, Muhammad was merely

instructed to acknowledge the actions of God in the world, and to make

known the fact that any present bounties anywhere derive from him alone.

The collective knowledge that Allah was behind every fortune in social lifewould in itself assure the irreversibility of such fortunes.

Since the source of prophetic identity is situated outside of the self and

is defined as incomprehensible via the customary methods of inquiry, the

identity and the project become themselves irreversible. A prophet no

longer ponders identity. The heroic identity, by contrast, requires continu-

ous reinforcement, performance, retelling, and granting by an audience.

Whereas a hero is impossible without an attentive audience, a prophet

lives and dies as such in spite of the indifference of the audience. ‘Antara’s

report on his heroic virtues succeeds only when the appeal for a heroic

identity is granted by the audience. But here, the “audience” is simply a

placeholder for the finitude of knowledge transmission.‘Antara’s ode ends

by relieving all anxiety about fate thereafter, so the burial of the speech

can be undertaken with equanimity. All danger of the “unknown” in the

world has been eliminated: Should ‘Antara now be killed by his enemies,

he says, he is not worried, for he has done them greater harm than they could ever redress.

With this certainty, he surrenders to the openness of the desert and

goes on. There is no teleology awaiting him, no destination: He is funda-

mentally unworried. Being slain by enemies no longer matters. Life as a

hero has reached its highest possible peak. No more accumulation is pos-

sible save, perhaps, for a metaphysical transformation. With the impossi-

bility of further additions, the discourse comes to a halt. For not only has

he transcended mortal society so as to have become fundamentally un-worried, but that in the process, he discovered that this highest freedom

to move was that founded upon the separation of one’s actions from their




consequences. Accountability for one’s own actions, though continuing

to be a matter of nature, is no longer worrisome. One no longer worries;

rather, one welcomes the natural response to one’s prehistory.

It was this attitude that the sedentary society was to repackage under

the rubric of “duty,” along with its attendant replacement of heroes by

prophets. That is, resting with a clear conscience became a psychic state

that was possible because of an awareness that all possibly harmful out-

comes that one might risk by performing according to the dictates total-

ized as “duty” are obviated by valuing duty as the realm whose achieve-

ment is life’s highest goal. In other words, “duty” spelled out an amnesty

that made thinking of consequences irrelevant. “Duty,” in the sedentary

setting, was therefore a formula that repositioned its performer worrilessly on the road toward the upper boundaries of life. In the process, it was dis-

covered that such boundaries—since no heroes or witnesses were there to

make them or provide infinite knowledge about them—must belong to a

transcendental form of subjectivity, for which the only witness (as the

Qur’an clearly spelled out) was the prophet himself. Thus, the process by

which credentials are ordinarily endowed in society is reversed, whereby

the requisites of witnessing are taken away from the audience and rede-

posited into a phenomenon called prophethood.

the tear of the poet and the fear of the prophet:

failures of be longing

A transformation along the lines just described requires a great deal of

self-reflection, a will to metamorphosis, an agony of redefining the mean-

ing of communal belonging. The sira tradition emphasizes Muhammad’searly seclusion very clearly. But the process itself had clear parallels and

models in existent practices and discourses. Pre-Islamic poetry provided

models for identity transformation at great length, as did the tradition of

tribal outcasts (sa‘alik ), who were defined by their lack of fit into existent

tribal mores and who could not be easily reintegrated into the tribe once

they expressed an atypical individuality. Imru’ l-Qays provided an early

model of such an agony, a model that was distinguished by its acceptance

of the tragic nature of an irrevocable lack of belonging, even though thepoet continued to act partially on the basis of the duties incumbent upon

such a belonging. His ode opens with an alienated memory attempting to




reclaim a place or, more precisely, condemned to stand in front of it and

engage with it in a hopeless duel, only to withdraw in the disarray of de-

feat, having failed to retrieve from the jaws of its pastness that peculiar

form of togetherness that it had so deceivingly promised. Here, the trace

of this togetherness acts like a mirage, a deluding paradisiacal scene at the

end of the horizon, which instigates a desire doomed to nonfulfillment, a

desire that only reminds of what is lacking. Like the prophet who searches

after traces of ancient prophethoods in the landscape of the present, the

nomadic poet is cognizant that the lack of completion of an old project is

an essential property of the present. For the prophet, this lack instigates a

hope of retrieval. For the poet, it also instigates such a hope but simulta-

neously decrees its unfulfillability.35

For both poet and prophet, ruins and remembrance go hand in hand.

Whereas the prophet recognizes mental ruins—such as the faith of

Abraham existing in corrupted forms—the poet recognizes physical ruins,

which indicate a lost condition of earlier harmony, tranquillity, and to-

getherness. Ruins are traces of a past state of meaningful totality, since the

trace is noticed as a trace of something larger in the first place. The re-

membrance itself seems to emulate the nature of that which instigates

it, being itself assembled in the form of fragments. Unlike the eventual

prophet, however, the poet strives after no recognizable “system.” His is a

nomadic remembrance: One remembers at will and responds to stimuli

as they come. Prophetic remembrance, on the other hand, is ultimately

oriented toward a “system,” understood as a purposeful kind of discourse

in that it ties various discussions together for the sake of delivering a judg-

ment or positing a context. The nomad, by contrast, remembers at will,

and likewise aborts the memory at will. He returns to himself. He forgetsthe confrontation. There is no lingering remorse. There is no discernible

impact, no sign of indelible injury brought about by this sudden aware-

ness of nonreturning time.

Whereas the prophet moves on to revisit the stories of past prophets as

a chronicle leading up to him, the poet interrupts the meditations on the

past in order to tell a unique story of the self. The narrating poet begins

the story of the self always after having remembered. A trace in the midst

of nature, barely recognizable, introduces him as a narrator with an indi-vidualized story of a unique and namable love. That love is now entrusted

to the hands of a trace upon a certain topography, which is referenced,




described, cried upon, and given a name, and the journey continues. The

trace, after all, is something that is itself departing. Its very feebleness con-

firms the reality of time, the irreversibility of its unilinearity, the finitude

of all things dear to the heart, the impending demise of the observer him-

self. A trace of the thing is the warning that all things are moving toward a

prescribed nullity, that all movement will ultimately halt. For the prophet,

on the other hand, the trace is nourished and carefully cultivated until it

comes back to life in his own personhood. The poet, by contrast, com-

mences the story of the self after having realized the ends of time, his

story now being told from beneath the overwhelming weight of finitude

and the overbearing weight of the halt, informed by the knowledge that

what had been is unrepeatable. The poet emerges, not as a total subjectbut as a trace of the self, “perishing of sorrow” (Imru’ l-Qays, c. 5), slowly

reconstituting, painfully crystallizing.

To perish of sorrow is that essential experience that allows the self to

shed the skin of its past and reemerge anew in order to populate the rest

of the ode. One stands facing the ruins not to ponder their wisdom, to

register their difference, to linger in one region of memory, nor to mea-

sure the magnitude of time’s revenge against life. The fundamental expe-

rience of the ruins transports the observer into their essence of dilapida-

tion. He himself becomes the ruins. As the fundamental experience that

instigates the discourse, the appreciation of the ruins consists not of a

simple commentary on their being or logic; rather, it is lodged in an act of

dissolution in front of them. To notice nomadically is to inhabit, to pos-

sess, to become of the same element. Noticing, after all, is a precondition

of halting; that is, it is the promised experience that causes the nomad to

momentarily abrogate his habitual wandering.This abrogation endows acts of halting and meditation with an appar-

ent extremism of character. The halting poet and the meditating prophet

are reconstituting a prior order that had been synonymous with nature—

a certain notion of the self; thus the tear of the poet, the fear of the prophet.

These are the rituals of metamorphosis which, in some way, are prefig-

ured in the original seclusion (of the prophet) and lonely interrogation of

traces (of the poet). For the poet, to shed a tear is the explicit “purpose” of

halting (“Halt, friends both! Let us weep, recalling a love and a lodging”[c. 1]). Likewise, Muhammad’s fear, occasioning the command to recite,

his escape, and his search for refuge, commence his prophethood and




offer unmistakable signs of its authenticity, for him as well as for the early

faithful. For the poet, the tear is offered as an authenticating stamp of the

new self, understood as the fruit of dissolved or departing experiences.

The intensity of the crying itself seals the rupture between the unre-

claimed trace and the impending future of this self, as the poet himself ac-

knowledges: “Yet the true and only cure of my grief is tears outpoured: /

what is there left to lean on where the trace is obliterated?” (c. 6). The

fear of the prophet fashions a new self, a self with a project, a mission, and

a tradition. While the tear pronounces healing and freedom from pre-

history—whence the new self could commence—the fear pronounces that

healing is impossible until the mission is completed; hence, the intensifica-

tion of the weight of a vast prehistory.For this reason, unlike the poet, the prophet cannot afford the luxury

(or agony) of a socially unanchored or exiled self as a foundational trope

of his identity, since his discourse could engender healing in the world

only through the active endorsement of an audience to which he belongs.

However, Muhammad’s proselytization in Mecca was a failure by any

standard. Eight years after his emergence as a prophet, he had accom-

plished no social breakthrough and was beginning to suffer disorienting

personal losses as well: the death of his wife Khadija and, perhaps more

significantly, of his protective uncle Abi Talib. Abi Talib’s death had a more

immediate and severe outcome, for Muhammad then had to act as noth-

ing but a prophet, being for the first time without his traditional protec-

tion, which had up until then allowed him to blaspheme the established

order without fear of repercussion. The traditional sira reports the begin-

ning of unprecedented abuse of Muhammad at that point, especially

as no universally respected Hashemite figure surfaced to protect him im-mediately after Abi Talib. By then, most of the traditionally significant

Hashemites had already joined Islam, many of them doing so out of clan-

nish solidarity with their kin rather than out of conviction. And many of

them were already living far away in Abyssinia.

For the prophet, such events constituted a severe lesson in social irrele-

vance, and not only because seemingly influential clan members could no

longer provide the traditional protection. The death of Abi Talib brought

to the fore the sad truth that the uncle could protect and perpetuate themission of a prophet in the community only because he was a universally

respected infidel, just like the infidels who were to assume Muhammad’s




protection afterward. Meccan Muslims then needed protection not so

much because they were another sect in Mecca as because they insisted on

replacing the established ontotheological order. That insistence, coupled

with numerical weakness, meant that Muslims who would otherwise be

prominent society members could no longer be immune from reprisals.

Prominent Muslim merchants then had to forge individual protection

agreements with specific infidels who were either their relatives or with

whom they had commercial or other dealings.

Though the tribal/communal experiences of exclusion encountered in

pre-Islamic poetry often instigate a (half-hearted) poetic effort at recon-

ciliation, a similar experience by a prophet allows reconciliation only at

the cost of the prophetic identity itself. Even when motivated by specificcommunal concerns, prophetic discourse transcends the bounds of the

tangible community. Thus more than the poet, the prophet can voluntarily

break away from the tangible community, an alternative already exempli-

fied in the earlier migrations of some followers to Abyssinia. But such

migrations, in turn, confirmed to the rest of the Meccan society the ir-

relevance of the Muslim community in its midst, thereby accentuating

the harassment of the Muslims and thereby stimulating even further the

prophetic temptation to universalize the mission.An early experience with

the world outside of Mecca at that point materialized as a desperate ven-

ture into the agricultural community of Ta’if, where Muhammad under-

went a level of mockery and humiliation he had never endured in Mecca;

he was ultimately forced to leave empty-handed.36 But that episode in it-

self illustrates the resilience of prophetic identity, which is based on the

ability to detect signs of success and retrieval among the ruins, where the

poet saw only death, an unfulfilled desire for healing, and eventual depar-ture. The isolation in Mecca and the cataclysmic failure in Ta’if occasioned

the Qur’anic revelation of the surah of al-Jinn, which proclaimed—in a

rare reversion to the mystical realm—Muhammad’s success in bringing a

community of jinn into Islam, precisely as he was heading back to the

increasingly inhospitable Mecca, suffering from a major failure.37

The disentanglement of the project of prophethood from the specifici-

ties of Mecca was sealed, however. After the dialectic of worldly debacle in

Ta’if and an otherworldly triumph with the jinn, Muhammad reenteredMecca in a way that must have confirmed the degree of the prophet’s de-

pendence on temporal and tribally based (rather than otherworldly and




divine) protection. Muhammad spent days awaiting a favorable response

to a request for a traditional protection (ijara ) that he submitted to no-

table Meccan infidels. After two rejections, an ijara was finally extended to

him, and he could enter the city again without fear of harassment.38 But

though Muhammad continued to dwell in the city, he was essentially on

his way out, as the project of prophethood had reached a standstill there.

The pilgrimage season became a period of intense activity for him, as it

became an opportunity to meet other Arabs who came from throughout

the peninsula. From then until his migration with the Muhajirun to

Medina, traditional Islamic history records less communication between

the Muslims and the rest of Meccan society. The exclusive preoccupation

with the fate of the “mother of towns” was abandoned, the Muslim creedbeing gradually universalized in orientation. Always attentive to angles

that might lead to success in his mission, the prophet began to apply the

mission to all people equally, regardless of tribal affiliation, as Mecca in-

creasingly seemed like a lost cause. The seeds of this orientation were

already there in an earlier discovery that prophethood was there to guide

the rich and the poor alike, irrespective of established rules of social hier-

archy and valuation of human worth.39

From the vantage point of traditional society, such an expansion of the

mission is problematic mainly because it reveals a rift within the commu-

nity to the world outside; thus, the community would need to account for

Muhammad or, more precisely, for a prophetic phenomenon that had

weakened the harmonious image that Mecca held in the peninsula.

According to Ibn Hisham, the elders of Quraysh convened in order to

unify their position on refuting Muhammad (or, perhaps more probably,

on explaining his behavior to the pilgrims). They debated whether to de-scribe him to the visitors as a kahin (a soothsayer), a madman, or a poet.

They finally resolved to describe him to the Arabs as a magician, on one

ground, namely, that his sayings were magic insofar as they alienated

otherwise indivisible entities: “the one from his father, his brother, his

wife, and his kinsfolk.”40 In other words, Muhammad was to be defined as

a spoiler of nothing less than the self-evident nature of human bonding.

His “magic” consisted of his ability to subvert such an entrenched order

by using no more than words.Thus, though one of the grounds that frustrated Muhammad’s mission

in Mecca was his failure to produce the miracles demanded as justification




of his prophetic claims, he was freely advertised as having a capacity for

magic (that is, the ability to subvert nature) by the same people who had

once demanded the miracle that would accomplish a comparable feat.

The clear difference between the magic and the miracle, at least in this

case, is that the nature that the magic overturns is human rather than

physical nature. On the other hand, the source of this magic, more than in

the case of the miracle, can be isolated and dealt with more easily: Words,

after all, furnish the modality by which magic does its work. Unlike

the miracle, therefore, the treatment of the effects of magic takes place

through rendering words inaudible to an unreceptive ear.

Thus, the “magic” of words is silenced by excluding the author, who

had subverted nature, from the community to which he otherwise be-longs irrevocably—that is, by nature. Tarafa Ibn l-‘Abd and Imru’ l-Qays,

it must be recalled, were thrown out of the tribe as much for their poetic

proclivities as because their musical words threatened social nature, since

they stood in the way of the poet’s expected assumption of normal tribal

obligations. Like Muhammad, Tarafa, following his ostracism, always

navigated the borderline between the new territory of the self and the old

territory of the tribe, between an uncharted region of possibilities and a

known region of confinements and responsibilities.Whereas Muhammad’s

prophetic identity had already been well formed by the time of his depar-

ture from Mecca, Tarafa’s experimentations with new identities began

largely after his expulsion, with his words—the source of his dilemma—

being also the means to his new faces. Thus, for Tarafa, the protestation of

his lonely fate is just loud enough to be audible but not so resolute as to

blazon a thoroughly novel march of a notion of the self beyond its collec-

tive prehistory. Thus, his wisdom, defenses, logic, and thoughtful deliber-ations are always placed after a discourse of carefree hedonism. Unlike the

early Imru’ l-Qays before embarking on his tragic quest after his father’s

withered kingdom, who spoke of his pleasures matter-of-factly as they

came, Tarafa, like Muhammad, is aware of his history, his society, and his

audience. But unlike the prophet, his discourse is also attentive to the ever

present accusation of dereliction of duty.

With the notion of “duty” becoming more important after the institu-

tionalization of poetry (as already exemplified in the cases of ‘Antara,Labid, Zuhair, ‘Amru, and others), pre-Islamic poets became less confi-

dent of their entitlement to carefree, tribally detached self-reference, in




spite of the originality of their “magic” of words. Even Imru’ l-Qays,

whose hedonistic pursuits were also responsible for his ostracism, found

himself compelled to eventually perish in a preordained and half-hearted

quest after the lost kingship of the same father who had expelled him in

the first place. The ostracized poet, just like the ostracized prophet, was

incapable of becoming indifferent to his own collective prehistory. Tarafa

was always at work on a new synthesis of morality, asking the tribe to

grant this first subject in its history, the poet, a new right for a special be-

havior, for an individual name, for a distinct voice to speak with. He was

only slightly ahead of his times, for that right was granted at a later stage,

when the power of the poetic word was appropriately recognized and

when a subsequent generation came to reverse the low opinion thatMa‘bad—Tarafa’s eldest brother—held of Tarafa’s usefulness, and also to

reverse Ma‘bad’s opinion of poetry in general (that it could never return a

herd that had wandered off or been stolen while the shepherd was trans-

fixed on poetic meditations).

Until that point, however, words continued to be the means to discover

the new possibilities of the ostracized self, a self devoid of affiliation and

duty. As Tarafa challenges his relatives to leave him alone with his own

habits, he immediately realizes that that could not be done unless they

abandoned him (c. 79). This sudden discovery propels a desire for an

otherness of being (c. 80–81), a desire complete with names and charac-

terizations, circumscribing wealth and power. After speculating on the

consequences of his hypothetical attainment of the identity of empirical

dignitaries (“then I’d have been a man of much substance, visited / by all

the springs of nobility, chiefs and sons of chiefs” [c. 81]), Tarafa’s ode an-

nounces the completion of his transition toward a new identity of the self (c. 82–92). The new identity acquired at this stage pronounces not the

finitude of separation from the tribe but, rather, the modality upon which

the poet, like the migrating prophet, will be transported back to his soci-

ety at the prestigious moment of his death (c. 93 and afterward). For the

poet, the transition into the new identity allows a return by relieving him

from having to defend himself before his kinfolk.

The new identity begins with a self-definition (c. 82): “I’m the lean,

hard-bitten warrior you know of old.” As in the case of ‘Amru and ‘Antara,this identity is conveyed to an audience that should have known his quali-

ties before the speech itself began. The recognition that the audience does




not need to be told what it is actually being told, as in the case of the

prophet, is a source of crisis precisely because the speaker here knows

beforehand that what should have been known before the speech will

continue to pass unrecognized after its delivery. But in this case, the de-

claration of this self-standing identity is followed by (rather than logically

leading to) a reconciliation, whereby the desires of the poet lead not to ex-

clusion but to a harmonious communal festival (c. 87–92). That is a sig-

nificant event in the ode, since the festival is arrived at teleologically by an

act of deviance; the story commences with an attempt by the poet to steal

a camel and ends with neither his success in the undertaking nor with his

punishment but with all parties concerned enjoying the benefits of such a

grand animal. As we shall see, the reconciliation of the prophet withMecca at the end of his mission follows similar dynamics: The final fight

is avoided, the blood of the infidels is spared, and their social position is

maintained and incorporated into Islam. The struggle of the ostracized

voice with the source of ostracism is not a ground of total annihilation of

either party by the other but itself furnishes a new dialectic of reintegra-

tion and reunion. This reunion is possible only when the community dis-

places its definition of the new words from magic to miracle. Unlike the

divisive magic, the miracle—in Muhammad’s case it was to be divine

words themselves—becomes the ground for new harmony.




the tribe

The beginning of open proselytization by Muhammad in Mecca,after three

years of reclusive confinement within the small network of the early faith-

ful, was reportedly instigated by the Qur’anic instruction:“Admonish your

nearest kinsfolk and show kindness to those of the believers who follow

you.”1 This delineation of the audience spelled out an entire range of pre-

sumptions, foremost of which was that the new religion intended to speak

to society according to its existing terms of social organization. It also

marked the emergence of the social nature of religion; though the early

Sahabah (companions)—as a cult of semi-Hanifi mystics—came from di-

verse family backgrounds, the open propagation of faith called for an ap-

proach outlined in terms of traditional mechanisms of exerting influence

in society. Open propagation, as opposed to selective and slow-paced

recruitment, brings forth a hitherto less-vexing question of grand rules of

social valuation. And here, as in Bedouin society, it was the recruitment of

the close nasab (line of descent) relatives that established a sense of socialsecurity, around which less-durable alliances with members of farther

nasab lines could be forged. As far as grand alliances were concerned, that

179

seven

The House of the Umma

and the Spider Web of the Tribe



was the only structure that tribal society, and Muhammad himself, knew.

It was on the basis of its logic that the first attempt at expanding the

network of faith took place. The quick failure of that attempt, which

the tradition condenses in the devastating mockery of the prophet by

his uncle Abi Lahab, left Muhammad with the task of inventing a path-

breaking paradigm of social solidarity. In fact, the Qur’anic singling out of

Abi Lahab—as a personification of this essential predicament—for eternal

damnation could be seen as a hint at the frustration felt at the magnitude

of such an additional and unanticipated task occasioning the aftermath of

the Qur’anic command.2

Immediately after designating the closest of kinsmen as the first recipi-

ents of divine news, Allah instructs his messenger to be humble towardany followers. In this second element, the highly distinguished responsi-

bility of single-handedly salvaging the world is balanced out by prohibit-

ing the prophet from worldly eminence should he succeed.3 Muhammad

is allowed thereby to claim no personal political design, no self-interest,

and no subjective accountability for his actions, as he simultaneously

deflects the question regarding his particular selection to prophethood.

In this case, the Qur’an sees parallels to Muhammad’s role, predicament,

mission, and social position in earlier prophetic traditions. Thus, the

prophet Salih is none other than a simple member of the brotherhood of

Thamud, distinguishable only by an arbitrary prophetic assignment. And

like Muhammad, he denies receiving any gratification from the neces-

sity of his prophetic assignment.4 The notion of the brotherhood of the

prophet to his community is abundantly evident elsewhere in the Qur’an.

The idea possessed the unique quality of containing an implicit allusion

to egalitarianism, while invoking a traditional notion of mutual obliga-tions. Thus, though they expound deep trepidation about the fate of their

societies as an exemplary form of brotherly concern,5 ancient prophets

shield themselves thereby from the social irrelevance awaiting those who

perceive of a crisis of communal meaningfulness without being able to

produce a consensus behind their diagnosis of it.

At some points in the early Qur’an, the attempts to incorporate the

imagery of strong kin relationships seems to overpower the barrier that

otherwise divides the believers from the unbelievers; among all of the in-fidels, for instance, Abraham singles out his father for a special appeal for

divine clemency.6 Thus, having accepted traditional kinship ties as the

180 • The House of the Umma



model for the ideological battle in the open community, at least for the

time being, the Qur’an sought to generalize—rather than replace—such a

conception of social cohesiveness. At what was evidently a later stage, the

Qur’an rendered Noah’s last requests to Allah before the flood as follows:

“Forgive me, Lord, and forgive my parents and every true believer who

seeks refuge in my house. Forgive all the faithful, men and women, and

hasten the destruction of the wrongdoers.”7

Thus, immediately before the deluge was to cleanse the earth, and after

nearly a thousand years of fruitless preaching, Noah humbly makes his

last statement, specifying who ought to be forgiven. Significantly, this is

the only instance in the Holy Book in which Noah’s parents are men-

tioned; they are neither denounced nor praised nor historicized anywhere,not even in this context. They are to be forgiven not because they belong

among the believers but solely in their capacity as the prophet’s parents.

In the sequence of Noah’s requests for salvation, they come immediately

after Noah himself and, interestingly, before the believers who join Noah

of their own volition. The believers themselves, to be sure, appear in the

aya (Qur’anic verse) only after they had been united with Noah at the fa-

milial level: They are those who join him not simply in an abstract bond

of coreligiosity, but in his own house.

Here, the Qur’an transcended the predeterminacy of familial linkages,

but only by extending their domain. The idea of the family was reasserted

on grounds that were supposedly more solid than blood relationships:

Now all believers, men and women, were one family. The nasab line was

losing its monopoly over the direction and content of social loyalties.

Nonetheless, that was not the whole story. Side by side with the develop-

ment of that concept of familial cohesiveness of the faithful, there devel-oped a dynamic aiming at reuniting the entire divided community, faith-

ful and not so faithful alike. The substitution of the social cohesiveness of

believers for that of genealogical families divided in faith implied a threat

to the established order of social bonds. As such, it pointed the way to a

lurking, novel paradigm of social solidarity that could challenge the anti-

quated one if the community as a whole failed to listen to the harmoniz-

ing message of Allah.

The heroic poetry of pre-Islamic times, by contrast, viewed the ques-tion of tribal/communal solidarity almost exclusively on the basis of con-

flicts with outside threats, without which the question of solidarity could

The House of the Umma • 181



scarcely be articulated. The most representative discourse in this genre is

perhaps the ode of ‘Amru Ibn Kalthum, whose portrayal of tribal soli-

darity as a natural certitude is spelled out largely in the context of address-

ing its nemesis, the king of al-Hira in lower Mesopotamia. Here, the poet

wants from the outset to inform the king of a certitude (yaqin) (c. 20). In a

highly pitched heroic tone, this certitude flows thereafter from a collective

subject “we.” The poet becomes the spokesman of his tribe, and the poetic

discourse becomes its collective and embodying speech. In that case,

poetry had already become, much like the Qur’an after its socialization,

more than a pure, socially unanchored, wide-eyed ontology inspired by

being out amid the limitless horizons: It had also become a medium of

political speech and an ingredient in the games of power. In ‘Amru’s ode,therefore, one encounters one of the longest thematic continua in ancient

poetry, propelled into motion by immediate sociopolitical concerns. The

speech on behalf of the tribe (much as in the ode of al-Harith, ‘Amru’s

poetic competitor) is conditioned by what the forms of solidarity that

instigate it presuppose: a minimum common denominator, a permanent

meeting ground, a stable collective character, and perhaps an enemy (or at

least a distinct notion of outsidedness).

A discourse obsessed with the imperatives of predetermined sociability,

like the poetry just mentioned and the social Qur’an, with a persistent

pedagogic posture toward the community with which it was concerned,

ultimately forfeits an earlier aura of spontaneity, discontinuity, and prox-

imity to a less-demanding realm of nature or outsidedness. In the heroic

ode, the collective subject imposes itself on the scene, thereby forcing the

poet to exhibit responsibility toward a preexistent tradition of solidarity

and to profess a thematic continuity incumbent upon the threat facingsuch an order. These elements rapidly deplete the poetic discourse of all

meditative potential and cosmological, encyclopedic effort evident else-

where in the pre-Islamic mu‘allaqat (odes). There are no secrets of being

here, no mysteries of nature or exteriorities, no reflections on life, no

codes from a house of wisdom, not even an ontological ground for the

ethic of responsibility itself. In ‘Amru’s ode, the speech flows in one direc-

tion, to an addressee who had been named only once but who continues

to be addressed throughout, as though his eternal presence has becomeso natural that no reminders of his identity need ever be reissued. From

the dissipation of the hedonistic mist (c. 20) to the end, no couplet is suf-




ficiently attuned to the dizzying array of ontological hints to carry it onto

a new path—as is frequently the case elsewhere in pre-Islamic poetry as

well as in much of the Qur’an. No verse is independent or discontinuous

enough to form a curvature in the discourse, none excavates beneath the

surface of the obvious confrontation. A straight line persists all the way

through, exposing no more than a single unchanged scene, exposed by no

more than the dim light of a normalized, socially entrenched, and service-

able poetry. As we shall see, the Qur’an also displays this awareness of

threat to the community from an outside source, which is less namable

nonetheless.

As a communal discourse, the heroic sequence in pre-Islamic poetry

shares with the Qur’an as well as with that of other poets (for example,Labid) an orientation toward planned, purposive speech. But this mode

of planning exists at a level somewhere between the Qur’an’s referential

tableaux and Labid’s cyclical ordering. Unlike the Qur’an, ‘Amru’s ode

does not so much seek to redefine the nature of communal bonds as to

deliver an image to the outside world regarding what the community fun-

damentally is . And unlike Labid’s discourse, ‘Amru’s method of ordering

his speech is conditioned not so much by the imperatives of the work’s

internal logic as by the need to reinforce the presence and definition of

the audience, the community, the addressee, the function of “speaking on

behalf of,” and the intersubjective common denominator. The plan is uni-

linear rather than multidirectional, digressional, or cyclical. Though, like

most other odes, it is unhampered by fragmented, discontinuous,“mixed”

figuratives, ‘Amru’s ode’s claim to unity rests on the name of the tribe

from which it ostensibly emanates. Its speaker is a collective subject (we),

incapable of disbanding or forgetting the conditions acquired and gradu-ally consolidated as the speech unfolded. Furthermore, such a collective

subject is defined throughout the ode antithetically, by the continuing

presence of an enemy, who is the addressee of the speech. Thus, whereas

the cyclical ordering evident in Labid’s ode possesses the luxury of forget-

ting and remembering from a large reservoir of figurals, feeling no pres-

sure to come back home soon, no need to abort or extend a cycle beyond

its natural exhaustibility, the unilinear ordering cannot forget the social

condition keeping it together. Once that condition is dropped, the dis-course of the collective subject does not know where to “come back” to

but, instead, disbands on the spot.




Thus, in ‘Amru’s ode, the king of al-Hira is addressed at length, through

figuratives of heroism and glory that accumulate on top of each other. It is

impossible to abort the confrontation without annihilating one side, and

the resulting stalemate imprisons the poet’s speech in a cycle of endless

sameness. The persistence of a tribal confrontation that could not be put

down ultimately delivers not a triumph, as one would expect, but an out-

worn unity, illuminated in the tired fragment thrown in toward an un-

reachable end:

Our bodies were hung with glittering mail-coats

having visible puckers above the sword-belt

that being unbuckled from the warrior

reveals his skin rusted from the long wearing. (c. 70–71)

Like all forced continuities, this one, once lifted, discloses the erosion

forming underneath the heroic surface.

In this case, the skin is more than simply a metaphor. It is an allusion to

an entire method of organizing and conceiving of social cohesion. Its pri-

mal function is to clothe the body as an organically unified entity, thereby

setting the boundaries of that unity apart from nature and apart from all

that is designated as an exteriority. Thus, the valorization of this ultimate

guarantor of the unity and oneness of the self can only be undertaken

not under the dictates of subjecthood alone but also in the context of an

understanding of being as responsibility for handling exteriorities from

the point of view of an active, transformative project. In the case of heroic

poetry, and especially ‘Amru’s, such a being is overextended, overemployed,

rusted, restless. An unbreakable bond with power constitutes its collective

definition of subjectivity, infused by and limited to an indispensable re-sponsibility, whose fulfillment defines heroism and contours the tribe’s

collective speech in the noisy scene of a perennial battle.

In the Qur’an, by contrast, the notion of unity was condensed in Allah

as its ultimate guarantor, rather than the leader, the prophet, the poet, or

even the collective speech of the tribe. In the holy book, the very notion of

skin as the most certain guarantor and metaphor of the uniqueness and

unity of what it holds together is vociferously challenged.8 Physical as well

as natural unity comes here not from pure speech or human authority but, rather, from a unitary capacity (God’s power) that, though capable of

dismembering the human subject into noncommunicating fragments,




could also collect such fragments and deposit them into a larger order of

sociability, much as it gathers together pointlessly scattered clouds.9

The notion that the tangible community is a source of a concerned

speech motivates Qur’anic speech as it does ‘Amru’s ode, though the con-

clusions are dissimilar. Whereas the threat to the tribe in ‘Amru’s ode is

clearly definable and namable, that facing Mecca was more vague, though

no less real. The Qur’an clearly compares the peace of Mecca to the terror

reigning in the chaotic world just outside of its limits.10 As mentioned

earlier, Muhammad for many years did not regard the outside world to be

a proper domain for the message of Islam, and its problems were a matter

of concern only insofar as they provided useful instructional contrasts.

Before the eventual expansion of the realm of Islam, the Qur’an merely observed that amid the terrors of the world, Mecca was luckily safe. It did

not dispute the city’s right to be distinctly peaceful but, rather, merely

asked it to recognize the abstract force protecting it, lest it degenerate into

the resemblance of its uninhabitable surroundings. If the haram (sanctu-

ary) was the guardian—as most Meccans thought—then let that sacred

institution stand under the protective tutelage of a supreme power that

could maintain its repelling function beyond human doubt. Indeed, Allah

considers himself to be the “Lord of this [hitherto pagan] House,” in the

same context in which he emphasizes his role in safeguarding the fragile,

long-distance trade routes upon which the city’s economic survival de-

pended.11 In addition, Allah reminds Meccans of more concrete episodes

of supernatural protection,such as when the Abyssinian expedition against

Mecca (circa a.d. 570) was forced to retreat without a fight and under

mysterious circumstances.12 As it traces to Allah a protective function

against vague and abstract threats and challenges, the Qur’an disparagespagan effort to seek tribal safety in the objects of worship then populating

the haram, enlikening the frailty of such constructs to that of a cobweb.13

Here, again, the metaphor of the house, as in the case of Noah’s last ap-

peal, condenses the idea of tribal solidarity along familial and thus osten-

sibly unbreakable lines—unlike those woven in vain by the spider, only to

be obliterated by the first strong wind.

This embeddedness is easily discernible in the early Qur’an’s feeling of

belonging in and special relevance to Mecca.14 Muhammad was even re-ported to have at least once openly linked the theological aspect of his

message—abstract monotheism—to a political design that would make




the Arabs rally around Quraysh and subject others to its mandate. Sig-

nificantly, such a statement was offered in the context of Muhammad de-

fending himself against the charge by the elders of Quraysh that he had

“insulted our forefathers, ridiculed our faith, and degraded our deities.”15

The open appeal to the parochial interests of one city was repeated as

often as it was needed, at the expense of the universality of Islam, until the

migration of Muhammad and the Muslims from Mecca some years later.

The “mother of towns,” however, rejected such a logic precisely on

the basis of local relevance: If Islam was meant to be an essentially local

doctrine, then why was the messenger from the Banu Hashim branch

and not, say, from Banu Umayyah? Why would the prophet not be a dis-

tinctly honorable and wealthy man, instead of that thoroughly ordinary Muhammad? The problem of relevance came back to haunt the message:

If Allah wanted to play the game of relevance, then he should have played

by the rules. And the rules of relevance included more than praising the

locality, showing concern for its fate, promising it a fortune, and speak-

ing its vernacular. Above all, they involved accepting the community’s

conceptions of proper social roles and hierarchies. Eventually, the Qur’an

itself came to register such a discontent as it attempted—in vain—to re-

ject the right of the community to select its prophet according to its own

rules.16

The priority of kin spells out an inescapability of belonging in a pre-

determined fashion. This issue, however, is not so straightforward. Pre-

Islamic poetry furnishes a variety of models by which the enigmas incum-

bent upon such a belonging are encountered. The theme of belonging as a

background of an inescapably collective speech can be seen in the afore-

mentioned ode of ‘Amru. The expelled poets, likewise, had to renegotiatereadmittance into the tribe through a variety of mechanisms. But in other

cases, poetic speech expressed communal belonging by showing sophisti-

cated social concern for the community, which was expressed through

eloquent, wise sayings, in the way that Qur’anic speech was intended to

introduce the prophet to his community. The right to sagehood of those

poets who belonged—such as Labid and Zuhair—was more recognized

than that of someone who delivered discursive novelties intended to

distinguish sacred speech from ordinary wisdom. Thus for a long time,Muhammad and Qur’anic discourse occupied a status within the tribe

that was closer to that of the expelled poets and, as such, exhibited similar




symptoms of distress and lack of comprehension of the grounds of such

an exclusion.

However, though the Qur’anic response to the community’s refusal to

recognize the essential belonging of the faith in it was flavored with grad-

ually crystallizing anger, the odes of the expelled poets commented upon

the dilemma with a distinct tone of sadness and surrender. In Tarafa’s ode,

for instance, the transition into the ubiquitous trope of the virtues of

his camel commences with recognizing in the essence of the animal a

distressful predicament of departure and the magnitude of the distance

separating him from his community: “Ah, but when grief assails me,

straightforward I ride it off ” (c. 11). Tarafa is a lonely, expelled poet for

whom distance presented itself not as a matter for abstract significationbut as a decision by others that could be appealed. Thus, he does not sever

this hope by proclaiming it as a “fact”: Such an acknowledgment would

only naturalize its threatening materiality. Finding himself at the wrong

end of the horizon, he must act as though he had not yet perished. To

convince oneself of this endurance, therefore, is to purge the notion of

irremediable distance from the speech. It is because of such a peculiar

strategy of survival that Tarafa’s gestures toward the materiality of move-ment and involuntary wandering occur as though in the abstract, without

namings, without locations, oblivious to geography and to all compan-

ions who could be defined by a name and a personality.

By contrast, in poets like Labid and Zuhair we can discern the genesis

of the socially belonging, “responsible” poet, someone whose distinctive

speech becomes an emblem of tribal celebration as opposed to tribal os-

tracism. Such a poet had a solid abode, a safe belonging, and a proud tribe.

He was eminent, respected, and, unlike the nascent prophet or the sa‘luk

(tribal outcast) poet, never in danger of being expelled: His had become a

permanent form of speech in social life. The poet was no longer an ab-

solutely distinct subject, traveling with his shadow and experimenting with

the wilderness of discourse: He was about to become a social institution.

The poet had already become a “tradition,” a widely disseminated one,

an echo of an established form, already constituted in a prehistory after

which it was molded. The poet’s own voice could now assuredly float inthe distance, reaching perhaps beyond that mountain range, beyond that

“shimmering haze” in the infinite horizon (Labid, c. 53). But he himself




shall not move: The poet is a tradition now, he belongs on the ground

where his speech gathers itself.

Thus, we encounter in the poetry of poets who belong a sense of “real-

ism” whereby distance assumes an irremediable form that cannot be re-

pealed. Labid’s homage to the lover Nawar, for instance, is succeeded by an

elaboration of the meaning of distance.As opposed to (inexplicable) hope

of crossing the distance, Labid proceeds here according to the strategy of

naming as a method of mapping out the concrete meaning of separation

(c. 17–19): Labid distances the lover by an association with remoteness

and then piles upon the road toward her one location after another, a

plenitude of hindrances, with each name being a full obstacle by itself.

As such, this strategy of naming subscribes to the construction of lossencountered in traditional poetic openings, where naming functioned so

as to circumvent a loss, speak to it, then leave it behind. The multitudes of

naming then confirmed not only the distance of the place itself but also

the distance that the poet had crossed away from what is now to be ac-

knowledged as a loss by the magnifying operation of naming. Here, Labid

invokes the same technique in an interestingly new dimension; in the

traditional opening, naming overwhelmed the poet to such an extent that

he finally withdrew in awe, acknowledging the finitude of loss and its irre-

versibility, and wandered off elsewhere. The distance between the spatio-

temporal dimensions of the here/now and the away/behind is increased to

infinity. Now Labid’s namings, occurring after an opening that had its

share of them, usher in a different modality for acknowledging the loss: It

is not as though he is being refused entrance to or being repulsed from a

realm beyond the lived reality of loss. Rather, it is that, as a fundamentally

belonging poet, he shall take it upon himself to leave on his own cog-nizance, as a man free of love ought to: “So cut off your longing for one

whom you may no more attain” (c. 20). This mode of realism reconfirms

a resolute power over passions, a utilitarian vision of reality, and a sense of

freedom. The impediments to all such moments, rather than pursued

until the poet perishes of his sorrows, are now summarily dismissed by a

swift acceptance of “reality.” Yet it is this expression of freedom that, para-

doxically, only a firmly rooted narrator could expound.

Thus, to be free is essentially to be entrenched in one’s own society.Labid explicitly asserts the lover’s freedom to depart, to cut off, to break,

to acknowledge the irremediability of distance. Furthermore, the lover’s




resolution to break appears ambiguous: Not only does the lover speak in

the second person, he also generalizes the identity of the lover. It becomes

apparent, then, that what is meant is not the simple delivery of the poet’s

decision regarding the lady Nawar but, rather, the delivery of a universal

pedagogy. This privileged location, ostensibly possible only by an en-

trenched belonging, is paradoxically the fountain of a general advice re-

garding the subjective will over the matter of breaking bonds.

In this ancient poetry, the poet could habitually slip quietly out of feel-

ings of defeat, isolation, nullification, disenfranchisement, and so on with

as little noise as possible,17 sometimes abruptly, signifying annoyance, im-

patience, knowledge of unfreedom. The belonging poets, such as Labid,

make, on the other hand, a distinction between topics whereby the honor-able things in life, the worthy possessions, and the great adventures are

not pronounced or dispensed with the same ease as other topics (and we

will see how another great belonging poet, Zuhair, had to reason at length

for such a thing as the futility of a hopelessly stalemated tribal war). Labid

makes a decision implying a rational austerity of character rather than

continuing to gaze at a present state of impossibility that waits for the

decision to actualize itself, by some other externality that is impervious to

his pronouncement: A free poet sets the terms. A break is legitimated here

by what other nomads would regard as a mediocre factuality of distance.

For most of his tenure as a prophet, Muhammad oscillated between

the two models of belonging evidenced in the discourse of the pre-Islamic

poets, where belonging and freedom cohabited an uneasy conceptual

landscape. The impossibility of continued belonging in Mecca of a prose-

lytizing prophet, his eventual migration and war with the city, all exhibit a

consistent theme of belonging in spite of being an outsider to his city formost of his career as a prophet. According to traditional accounts, by the

eighth year after he had left Mecca, Muhammad had assembled all of his

loyal followers, sedentary and nomadic alike, and captured Mecca in an

astonishingly bloodless assault. Unlike in previous battles of the Muslims

outside the city or with other communities, there was no plundering or

dividing up of spoils of war. The city that had “thrown out” its son and his

followers only a few years before, the city that broke its commitment to

peace in order to marshal against him the biggest armies it could muster,offered no resistance to speak of and proved to be very receptive to Islam,

as if the entire conflict, from beginning to end, had been devoid of any




meaning. The estrangement of Islam from pagan Mecca was rectified on

the basis of a peculiar synthesis, a synthesis to which most Bedouins paid

little attention. Such a synthesis, furthermore, left many Ansar (Backers)

wondering whether they were little more than a bridge across which

Muhammad was to return to his original community, almost forgetting

them afterwards.18 Once firmly in control, Muhammad proclaimed Mecca

to be as peaceful as it ever was and again forbidding violence: reversing

the permission for killing that he had issued only the day before when an-

ticipating a fight to capture it. These are his words to that effect:

People! Allah has prohibited [violence in] Mecca on the day He created

heavens and earth. Thus it shall remain prohibited until the day of

resurrection. No one who believes in Allah and the Last Day shall shed

in it a drop of blood or cut a tree. [The violation of the prohibition]

was sanctioned to none before me, and shall be sanctioned to none

after me. That was allowed me only at this hour, for [Allah’s] anger at

its people. But now it is as prohibited as it was in the yesterday. Let the

present among you inform the absent one. Whoever says to you that

the messenger of Allah had fought in it, say [in response]: “Allah has

allowed it to his messenger, but not to you.”19

The transhistorical nature of Mecca in particular as a city of peace was

thus affirmed by a prophet who had led a merciless war against the city—

and intermittently against others. The fact that the Muhajirun (Meccan

Muslims who had migrated to Medina) and the Ansar retained distinct

communities spelled out the incorporation of frames of tribal belonging

into communities formed by the new faith. There are some reports that

indicate that the Ansar, even at the peak of their usefulness to Islamiccampaigns, continued to be regarded by Muhammad as outsider “people”

(nas ). This vision was expounded many years before, when Muhammad

first sensed his ability to defeat Mecca at Badr precisely by the power of

his non-Meccan allies. At that episode, Muhammad was reported to have

addressed the corpses of the Meccan notables killed in the battle shortly

before their burial: “You had denied me and the outsiders [nas ] believed

me; you had ostracized me and the outsiders sheltered me; you had fought

me and the outsiders supported me.”20

The predicament of belonging is abundantly apparent here, where

Muhammad and the Muhajirun decry their unfreedom and the fact that




they were driven to rely on strangers in order to restore a natural order to

their own city. Like so many of the paradoxes with which history books

overflow, the Muhajirun’s incessant concern for safeguarding the sanctity

of their city by an omnipotent power set in motion a complex chain of

events that ultimately returned the Muhajirun to their abode at the same

time that it unintentionally expanded the social boundaries of Islam.With

the final conquest of Mecca, Allah had finally accomplished the simple

mission of anchoring the loosely guarded livelihood of the community on

more solid theological foundations, but not without having to add many

unforeseen adjustments and teachings in the process. The full-bodied

Islamic state that ultimately emerged from such a complex web did not

only protect the Meccan socioeconomy and unite the societies of thepeninsula; it also conquered the outside world to such an extent that it al-

most forgot Mecca itself, developing in the process a much broader, more

complex, and more variably integrated sociopolitical order.

the ruins of the tribe

Traditional Islamic narrative, then, presents with the conquest of Mecca apicture of reconciliation that engendered a reformulation of the meaning

of belonging, which integrated some tribal dimensions.21 The prophet,

much like the expelled poet but with a more social strategy and under

more favorable circumstances, cannot simply lament his kinfolk’s lack of

understanding. After all, the tribe is not like ruins over which one could

weep for a while and then go on. One must continue to belong. For the

originary poet, ruins signified not so much the tribe as a loss of possibili-

ties. Standing by them, he ponders what has not happened: his own eman-

cipation as a subject free to belong and dwell where he loves, a subject

whose promised emergence from underneath the weight of the history of

predetermined sociability is continually frustrated. Here, ruins periodically

remind the poet that the promised emancipation had been postponed

once more, that freedom to love—which here defines subjecthood and in-

dividuality—is uncertain, that lovers will continue to depart, that separa-

tion must be accepted, against one’s will and in spite of the uncontrollablepassions, as the nature of things. As the dwelling of a past lover, the ruins

furnish firm evidence that a promise of harmonizing individuality and




sociability in a naturally expressed flow of desire—a promise of which no

more than traces are left—had been frustrated.

In the prophet’s case, this frustration is symbolized by the unforgiving

divine pronouncement of the fate of Abi Lahab. The anger, which origi-

nally distinguishes the prophet from the poet, dissipates quickly, however.

Deep, lonely, and fruitless anger is soon replaced by a compassionate

humility of the color of sorrow: “If they deny this revelation, you may de-

stroy yourself with grief, sorrowing over them,” the Qur’an ponders, be-

fore proceeding with a vengeful promise: “But We will surely destroy all

that is on [earth] to barren dust.”22

Here, the rejected prophet’s gaze at his society is refocused in the famil-

iar poetic modality, whereby all but traces is lost to sight. The prophetwould grieve over the remnants of his own tribe exactly as the pre-Islamic

poet reminisced over the ruins of the deserted lodgings of long-departed

affinities. But whereas the pagan poet blames nothing other than time’s

eternal cycles for the separation, the messianic messenger attempts to

warn of its potential materialization in the future. Unlike the expelled

poet, the sedentary prophet was not immediately in danger of being

ostracized, and the early Qur’an itself frequently instructed the prophet

to approach the infidels with patience and a good demeanor.23 In fact,

Muslim historians point out that the first time Muhammad suffered

harassment in the community was when he began to directly degrade

pagan objects of worship rather than when he propagated the idea of a

transcendental monotheistic God.24

In the context of the worldly prophetic mission, the specter of eventual

estrangement nullifies the value of fulfillment of individual desire, which

for a hedonistic poet like Imru’ l-Qays would have adequately counter-balanced the gloom of the ruins. In one instance, the Qur’an illustrates

the point through the case of an (unnamed) believer who is invited to

enter heaven as a reward for his responsible conduct. But instead of pro-

claiming his speechless delight at the offer, the lonely believer stands sadly

at the gate to eternal bliss to reminisce over the sad fate of his adulterous

tribe.25 Here, one is offered not merely paradise but also individual up-

rootedness and eternal separation from one’s society, past, and memory.

The believer who had to be estranged from his community on this earthcannot forget the estrangement, because the ability to forget means an

essential lack of belonging. The social conception of paradise allows occa-




sional estrangement from the community on earth because of the de-

ferred possibility of belonging. Once the deferral becomes eternal, the

lonely believer must lament not so much the fate of his people as the irre-

mediability of his own irrelevance to an essentialized form of sociability.

In pre-Islamic poetry, a comparable sense of loneliness is mitigated by

the invention of companions, to whom the poetic speech is explicitly

directed (for example, Imru’ l-Qays’s “Halt, friends both!”). There are ex-

ceptions, however. ‘Ubayd Ibn l-Abras’s ode is distinct in that it stubbornly

resists such a temptation and chooses to exalt the experience of aloneness

to its ultimate end, with no reference to a prehistory or a social being.

Such a behavior was rare and, as the early Muslim biographers were to

notice, nearly prophetic in character. However, most of the other ostra-cized poets, exemplified best by Imru’ l-Qays and Tarafa, always make an

effort to speak to someone, and their odes are populated with societal im-

agery. The odes of Tarafa and Imru’ l-Qays are saturated with a desire to

return to the fold, yet only on the poets’ own terms. Imru’ l-Qays returns

eventually, being forced through a strange twist of fate to assume a posi-

tion of responsibility within the tribe. He is, after all, the son of a king who

was murdered while the poet was still an outcast. He is the legitimate heir

to the throne, even though the kingdom itself vanished from the face of

the desert before the poet’s return to the tribe. The poet returns, but only

to the ruins of what he must claim in the name of social responsibility.

The news of the father’s death came to Imru’ l-Qays, so the legend goes,

one night when he was drinking and playing backgammon with his com-

panions. He responded: “He left me to rot when I was a boy, and now I am

a man he’s loaded me with his blood. We’ll not be sober this day, neither

drunken tomorrow. Wine today, tomorrow business [al-yaumu khamr wa ghadan amr ]!” There is a characteristic swiftness in this resolution of

a grown man suddenly finding himself burdened with responsibility

toward a sphere of belonging that had previously disowned him. Yet as

he finds himself saddled with the task of avenging his father’s death and

reclaiming the kingdom of Kinda, his subsequent poetry continues to

be extremely sparse on the matters of heroism or social duty, especially

when compared to other poetry of the period. It was only the pure opera-

tion of fate, rather than his design, that had placed him in the unforeseen,and a bit unfortunate, position of being heir to a kingdom that had just

been swallowed up by the sand. Imru’ l-Qays barely regrets the fate of the




kingdom, for women, nature, wine, and the horse continue to be his fa-

vorite companions. Yet there is the force of destiny moving him to reclaim

it, and there is a sense of naturalism in such a quest, in whose impossible

pursuit the poet ultimately perishes.

As discussed earlier, Imru’ l-Qays was born into a royal social hierarchy

that was the first of its kind under nomadism, only to witness its destruc-

tion by nomadic societies that stubbornly resisted all claims for and ob-

ligations encumbent upon such a novelty. The coming—and eventual

departure—of the idea of kingship indicated no emergent social space for

hedonistic or status-based luxuries. In expelling the poet, the father-king

reaffirmed that the timeless nomadic ethic of austerity, which poetic in-

dulgence was seen to threaten, had not been affected in the least by thecoming into being of his “kingdom.” Shortly thereafter, such a reaffirma-

tion was furnished once more when the nomads destroyed the kingdom,

which, in attempting to enforce taxation, had begun to misunderstand the

nomadic limits of tolerance for authority in general and for deductions

from subsistence conditions of survival in particular.

In the case of Imru’ l-Qays, then, we can sense the beginning of a reali-

zation that a seemingly timeless format of belonging was becoming less

meaningful. Being the heir to a throne at the precise moment when it no

longer existed meant nothing but an obligation toward a form of belong-

ing from which the one on whose shoulders the obligation was suddenly

placed was expelled. Thus, the one who had demonstrably failed in fulfill-

ing his obligations when the kingdom was still intact was nonetheless

still obligated toward it when it no longer existed. That is, the threat of os-

tracism, which regulates the fulfillment of obligations incumbent upon

belonging, could never result in an actual ostracism, even for one whoseostracism had been publicly proclaimed. The ostracized person would

still be obligated not only to seek to regain membership but also to defend

the order of belonging from which he had already been expelled. When

belonging is deemed to be a natural gift to which subjectivity is irrelevant,

a total loss of belonging is, in effect, impossible. Therefore, the conditions

of belonging appear to be eternal: One’s destiny is to seek a readmission,

to perform, and to re-prove one’s worthiness to belong. With Imru’ l-Qays

and the withering kingdom, we see a personification of tension betweentwo impossibilities: the impossibility of not belonging, given the nomadic

conception of natural order, and the impossibility of not indulging, which




grew out of the self-definition of the kingdom as an institution above or-

dinary and habitual society. But after the collapse of the kingdom and the

death of the poet, no traces were left except for a distinct form of speak-

ing. Poetry survived in the ashes, since in the primal act of being thrown

out of the kingdom’s domain, the phenomenon of poetry ceased to be any

longer a part of the self-definition of the kingdom or a tribally distinct

form of speech. Thus, it shared neither the fate of the kingdom nor that of

the poet.

For Imru’ l-Qays, therefore, the naturalism of belonging entailed also a

naturalism of a particular social position within the tribe that he was ex-

pected to fulfill, even though he was thrown out precisely because he was

not expected to be able to fulfill it. The prophet, on the other hand, may ormay not need to belong in some predestined fashion. For the Qur’an, the

requirements of belonging became increasingly subordinate to the fact

that the existent social structure failed to either realize the earnestness of

the prophetic mission at hand or to allot a distinct social space for such

a phenomenon. In this light, the success of the prophetic mission within

the community required a compromise of the rules of social order and

harmony, along with the traditional formats of belonging. The Qur’an

characteristically begins this task by citing the stories of ancient prophets,

who had challenged not only their societies but their own parents as well.

However, they are portrayed as having managed to do so without being

thrown out and losing social relevance thereafter. Thus, Abraham faces

his own father in the same way that Muhammad faces his adulterous

community: as an estranged yet passionately belonging member, who in

addition bestows upon himself an unrecognized authority to change soci-

ety’s beliefs. Abraham confronts his idol-worshipping father as well as theentire tribe, scandalizing social customs by assuming a pedagogic role to-

ward his elders. His expected failure results not in certain divine punish-

ment for the tribe but, rather, in his asking Allah to forgive his unrepen-

tant father in particular.26

In the Qur’an, there is a major antithesis to Abraham’s failure to com-

municate with his father, for which the model is indirectly provided in the

story of Joseph. An entire Qur’anic surah (chapter) is devoted to Joseph,

who succeeds in being reunited with his distressed and aging father; inthe story’s culmination, the entire family prostrates itself before Joseph,

the youngest of all. Joseph thereafter heals the divisive familial rift by




even though such an order becomes increasingly treacherous and menac-

ing toward those who have its best interest at heart. Thus, as Mecca con-

tinued to be at least an implicit focus of the return project for the ostra-

cized Muslims and Muhammad in Medina, it was becoming increasingly

obvious that war was the only means of return to what they continued to

regard as their essential community. In some important sense, the war ex-

hibited many symptoms of a campaign being waged against an unfaithful

but still much adored lover.

In his comprehensive documentation of the wars of Muhammad, al-

Waqidi reports on eight organized Muslim expeditions that took place

during the first two years after the hijra (migration), in addition to nu-

merous smaller ambushes against the caravans of Quraysh and some of its allies, all preceding the decisive battle of Badr.30 The Muhajirun, who

were apparently more clearly involved in such early adventures than the

Ansar, were also being instructed on the novel duty of fighting by the

Qur’an, which also in the process noted that it might appear detestable to

them.31 Such raidings, for the Muhajirun at least, involved clear economic

gains, which decreased the extent to which they were a burden on the

Ansar. However, the Qur’an legitimated the war by referring to a root

cause, the infidels’ disruption of normative social harmony ( fitnah), an

act that appalled Allah more than did acts of killing in the war.32

The war developed its rules while it was in progress. The category of

targeted infidels had to be narrowed down so as not to alienate other Arab

societies outside of Mecca or Medina, societies that had no prior animosi-

ty toward the Muslims and that showed no interest in the whole affair.

The war was to be waged exclusively against the infidels of the “Mother of

Towns,” where the Muhajirun ultimately belonged.33

Many of the rules of war, however, conformed to prevailing traditional norms instituted by

Mecca, notably abstention from fighting during the sacred months.34 At a

later stage, however, more detailed Qur’anic teachings allowed Muslims to

fight during those months if they were attacked, and in the holy haram of

Mecca only if they were assaulted while visiting it.35 As the warlike atti-

tudes deepened, the Qur’an temporarily abandoned the observance of the

sacred months; according to classical accounts, such a radical departure

was triggered by an incident during the last recorded skirmish before Badr,when an enthusiastic Muslim band raided a Qurayshan convoy, killing

some, taking others prisoner, and appropriating the cattle. Mecca used the




incident to denounce Muhammad’s breach of such a sacred time of the

year, and the bewildered Muslims were gravely disappointed at the shame-

ful behavior of their compatriots. For a number of days, Muhammad was

unable to decide on the proper handling of the crisis. Faced with the op-

tions of either apologizing to the infidels or justifying the unforeseen

breach by a group of Muslims, the Qur’an chose the latter, reaffirming in

the process the horror of fitnah as a more appalling source of evil than any

other form of transgression: “They ask you about the sacred month. Say:

‘To fight in this month is a grave offense; but to debar others from the

path of God, to deny Him, and to expel His worshippers from the holy

mosque, is far more grave in His sight. [Fitnah] is worse than carnage.’”36

The fitnah, consisting here of the disruption of a natural flow of com-munal harmony causing migration, had the status of original sin. Medina,

where the Muhajirun and Ansar maintained separate communities and

assumed distinct roles in the war against Quraysh, was yet to replace the

“lost” harmony of Mecca. Initially, most of the Ansar declined to join the

war, merely regarding it as a legitimate way of survival for the resourceless

Muhajirun. But the development of a common approach to the world out-

side of Medina was making itself more imperative with the passing of time

and events. Probably as early as the first pilgrimage season following the

hijra, the Qur’an had to instruct the Muslims regarding the nature of their

relationship to that great Meccan and peninsular tradition. In spite of the

pagan ontotheology surrounding the pilgrimage, it was nonetheless the

tradition that most expressed the preeminence of Mecca in the peninsula.

Thus, rather than being entirely disowned, the sanctity of the pilgrimage

was modified in the Qur’an so as to avoid the pagan rituals. The Muslims

were told that, with the exception of visiting the idols, pilgrimage practiceswere now Allah’s own decreed rituals (Sha‘a’er ), although Muslims were

still not strictly bound to follow them.37 The sanctity of the haram of Mecca

was reaffirmed, and so was the pilgrimage, although the nature of the

Islamic rituals to accompany it remained ambiguous until more explicit

instructions on the matter were provided at a later point in time.38

A year and a half after the hijra, the raids on Meccan caravans were begin-

ning to provide the Muhajirun with more than simple sustenance. They were beginning to acquire a confidence in their ability to harass, if not to

eventually conquer, the city they loved. It was around that time that the




Qur’an instructed all Muslims to face Mecca in their prayers, rescinding

the earlier specification of the direction of prayer (qibla ) as being toward

Jerusalem.39 It is significant that in both cases, the qibla was oriented

specifically toward a city, rather than toward some other cosmological or

natural locus. The religion looked upon itself as a religion for the cities,

for cities defined the world of approachable, organizable society. Locating

the qibla ordains a vision of distinct sanctity and an idealization of the

destination. In this case, it was also a deposition of hope in concretiz-

ing the idealized society through the efforts of the faithful on earth, a

moment that was much less evident in the case of Jerusalem.40 Though

Jerusalem had furnished an early link to ancient prophetic and mono-

theistic traditions, the crystallization of a distinct Muslim identity outsideof Mecca called for symbolizing such a distinction. This was especially the

case given the futility of Muhammad’s efforts among the Jews in Medina,

who remained indifferent to the intrusion of the Muslims. This fact was

clearly registered in the Qur’an, at the same time that it noted the increas-

ing self-confidence and self-sufficiency of Muslim doctrines, crystallizing

through incrementally revealed, distinct knowledge.41 Significantly, such a

change was announced both in terms of ending an earlier state of uncer-

tainty (“Many a time have We seen you [Muhammad] [shifting] your face

[around in the sky]”) and also in terms of acknowledging communal

desire over and above theological connections (“We will [then] make you

turn towards a qibla that will please you”).42

Such reorientations were taking shape shortly before Badr, when spo-

radic raiding finally gave way to a full-scale battle, which the Muslims

won, and at whose conclusion Muhammad, in the memorable speech

mentioned earlier, reproached the corpses of slain Meccan notables forhaving forced him to use outsiders to defeat them. Badr marked not

merely the first major military episode of the Muslims but also, and more

importantly, the beginning of an irreversible expansion of clan-based and

tribally based notions of communal obligations, which had heretofore

weighed in different ways among different Muslims. That accomplish-

ment, however, was not straightforward. Though Badr was the first joint

assault by both Muhajirun and Ansar, there was no consensus among the

Ansar with regards to their new role under Muhammad, even though they made up the majority of the Muslim army. Reportedly, many Ansar re-

frained from joining the fight, while others were dismayed that the cap-




ture of the wealth of the caravan, which was their sole intention, was no

longer possible without a fight after Quraysh mobilized to protect it.43 In

subsequent battles, many Ansar either resolutely refused to join or joined

only half-heartedly. Beyond the direct (and uncertain) acquisition of

spoils, the wavering elements saw little point in such adventures. But as

the escalating cycle of fighting called for an ever-increased number of

committed soldiers, increasingly vocal opponents of the war among the

Ansar were sharply denounced in the Qur’an as two-faced (Munafiqun).

The extent of denunciation of the Munafiqun in the Qur’an indicates

the degree to which they were perceived as threats, especially as the

Muslim community was becoming more warlike and thus in need of dis-

ciplined unity. In addition to an earlier defection of some Aussians to theside of Mecca, Muslim historians report more extensively on another,

apparently more serious, defection by a notable Khazrajite chief by the

name of ‘Abdullah Ibn Ubay. He was reportedly held in deep respect by

both Medinian tribes, and was on his way to being crowned as a king of

Medina shortly before Muhammad and his followers came to the city. As

king, Ibn Ubay would have fulfilled a political function that Muhammad

himself eventually took up, which consisted of transforming Medina from

a city in which each tribe lived in a castle built in anticipation of the ever-

present danger of tribal wars in the town to a place where intercommunal

relations were regulated by a consensual central authority.44 The interven-

tion of Muhammad seemingly added a supernatural ontological dimen-

sion to the trend, a dimension that, unlike a local kingship, had the added

advantage of promising to relieve local authority from consistent ques-

tioning on the basis of tribal credentials.

The details of the story of Ibn Ubay show the evolutionary nature andpoliticization of the idea of prophethood. Ibn Ubay continued to attract

some respect from the prophet, even after he repeatedly reversed deci-

sions made by the latter. In the Qur’an, his denunciation was never as

condemning as that directed at the more humble Munafiqun. He is fur-

ther reported to have forcibly prevented Muhammad from massacring

the Medinian Jewish tribe of Banu Qainaqa‘ after the Muslims’ euphoric

return from Badr, a dispute that ended with the Muslims sparing the Jews’

lives but exiling them from the city and confiscating their wealth. Heis also reported to have resolutely refused to aid the Muslims in Uhud,

rightly considering the battle to be an unwise adventure on their part, and




to have repeatedly complained about the submission of many of the Ansar

to whatever confrontation Muhammad resolved to herd them to.45 That as

a political movement Islam now had to negotiate terms of belonging with

local notables is testified to in the fact that in spite of his independent-

mindedness, Ibn Ubay was never pronounced to be a complete infidel.

Ultimately, however, the course of events dragged him along into the fold.

Faced with the fact that his tribe had already been involved in enough

acts of aggression to be practically at war with Mecca, with the consolida-

tion of Muhammad’s rule in the city, and with the increasing indulgence

of the Ansar in the new war economy, Ibn Ubay followed the practical

course of submitting to what had to be considered the will of Allah in the

land.46

Thus, the foundation of the new transtribal community was built

upon the ruins of another. After that moment of intertribal consolida-

tion, the Qur’an rarely revisits the idea of ruins and divine destruction

with the tone of sadness flowing from frustrated belonging or concerned

prophetic attachment. Rather, the notion of destruction becomes more

clearly associated with the idea of construction, whereby the dead mode

of social life that the ruins evidence begins to be seen as a sign of natural

evolution and displacement by better virtues. As a foundation for a new

form of community, the idea of destruction—up to and including mar-

tyrdom in the cause of Allah—begins to be addressed in terms of the

future dimensions of sociability that it opens up rather than in terms of

irremediable loss of all objects of love and belonging, which the early

Qur’an expressed much as did the traditional mu‘allaqat.

the satanic verses and their background

A politicized prophet is no longer simply one of the ideal types of es-

tranged and reconstituted belonging. Rather, his discourse is more heavily

flavored with the impulse toward eventual reunion. Thus, symbols of

Mecca’s preeminence in Arabia, such as the haram, are never assaulted by

the Qur’an in general. To the contrary, the very ground of the haram’s sa-

credness is traced back to Allah. Such a proposal sought to strengthen the

ground upon which the city’s prime symbol stood beyond and aboveuncertain tribal voluntarism, which was appealed to by filling the space

with objects of worship that various peninsular tribes could identify with




separately. That system of faith broke down repeatedly, as evidenced by

the many stories describing the Bedouins’ indifference to the spiritual

claims of sacredness that Mecca proclaimed about the haram among the

Arabs before Islam. By placing the haram under Allah’s tutelage, Islam’s

social relevance could be accentuated without risking Allah’s monothe-

ism, for the haram itself was not the object of pagan worship, unlike the

idols that populated it.

The manner by which communal peace was traced to Allah followed

an interesting trajectory, which at the conceptual level seems to have par-

alleled the trials and tribulations of the emerging Muslim community. In

the very early surah of al-Qalam, a mild show of Allah’s potential capacity

for destruction leads wrongdoers to repent, after a relatively minor com-mission of injustice, whereafter the divided society is reunited under God:

We have afflicted them as We afflicted the owners of the orchard who

had declared that they would pluck its fruits next morning, without

[saying: “If God wills.”]. A visitant from your Lord came down upon it

while they slept, and in the morning it was as black as midnight. . . .

And off they went, whispering to one another: “No beggar shall

enter the orchard today.” . . .And they began to blame one another. “Woe to us!” they cried. “We

have been great transgressors. We hope Our Lord will give us a better

orchard in its place.”47

Here, what the holy scripture abhors most is not the effort to seal off pri-

vate property and protect one’s orchard from the theft of its fruits but,

rather, a condition of acrimonious social disunity. Privileged access to

productive private property and the individual greed that is seen as symp-tomatic thereof are recognized as main sources of social schism. Interest-

ingly, however, such a recognition does not lead to a denunciation of indi-

vidual claims to distinct wealth or possession but, rather, to its regulation

by empowering God over all novel notions of individual earthly distinc-

tion. The verses above hint that the ill-fortune of the orchard’s owners

might not have been so bleak had they appended a note regarding Allah’s

will to their exclusionary resolution. Even when such a recognition is

withheld, divine punishment was not necessarily irrevocable. At the con-clusion of the story, Allah remains silent in the face of the owners’ wish

that their doomed orchard be replaced by a better one, suggesting the




possibility of such a generous recompense once the wrongdoers realize

the socially divisive outcome of their self-consuming obliviousness to di-

vine interest in communal harmony.

Such an early message implied that everything in the social order could

stay in its place, provided that Allah’s presence held emerging individual

distinctions in check. Such an early conception of Allah apparently at-

tempted to antagonize as few people as possible; even God’s entitlement

to issue threats or punish seem demure: The statement that retribution in

the other life would be worse than losing one’s orchard on earth is im-

measurably weaker than the horrifyingly detailed portrayals of life in hell

in the later Qur’anic surahs. In any case, what can be discerned here is the

genesis of a response to the emerging inegalitarian disharmony of seden-tary life, as well as an awareness of the threats facing such a state of affairs

in the material world.

According to this view, a divided society is self-evidently in error; in-

deed division is a sin in itself. Thus, though Thamud is announced to be

a sinful village deserving divine obliteration in many passages in the

Qur’an, the only instance at which the criteria for its evilness are specified

involves a brief allusion to its factionalism.48 In a similar vein, though the

parable of the confrontation between the erring pharaoh of Egypt and

Moses is recounted many times over in the Qur’an, only once are we

told why pharaoh’s sin is so unforgivable: “Now Pharaoh made himself

tyrant in the land. He divided his people into castes, one group of which

he persecuted [ yastad‘ef ], putting their sons to death and sparing only

their daughters. Truly, he was an evil-doer.”49

The evilness of the division assumes a more concrete meaning here, as

“dividing the people” means that one faction will suffer. The source of suffering in society is detected in a comparative fashion: The austere

Bedouin society could recognize no suffering as an absolute, concrete

manifestation as long as the standards of well-being were gauged within

that society itself. The Bedouins only realized their poverty once they

compared their austere life to that of the prosperous city. Within the city

itself, likewise, the idea of suffering had no comprehensible meaning until

its opposite was encountered. The development of different levels of wealth

within the different branches of Quraysh not only concretized the con-cept of suffering but also associated it with a disunity of the people.

Unjust persecution ( yastad‘ef ) of one section of the divided people was




therefore the potential outcome of any division of them in the first place.

The result of this injustice is driven home picturesquely: It is tantamount

to physically eliminating the sons of the weak caste while sparing its

women, a tactic reminiscent of the Bedouin raid. Thus, the brutality of the

Bedouin economy is comparable to pharaoh’s terror, indicating no desire

on the Qur’an’s part to substitute the antiquated cohesiveness of the no-

madic social unit to the vicious divisiveness of the city society. Thus, in

one stroke, the Qur’an identifies major pictorial aspects of badawah and

hadarah life as evil. First it points out the evils of the city society, but it

then proceeds quickly to make it clear that an impossible retreat to the

Bedouin past is not its intention at all.

The encroachment upon natural order of an alienating and distortedsystem of social relations cannot be easily rectified by a God whose pow-

ers are still uncertain, and who refuses to interfere with a world gone

astray, a refusal that extends to the point of refraining from revealing the

Qur’an by himself to his own messenger. He announces, thus, that no an-

gels can or will ever be allowed to dilute the distant perfection of his king-

dom in heaven by mixing in an unworthy earthly world, that the poisoned

and mortal world should be satisfied with a plainly human messenger:

“Say: ‘Had the earth been safe enough for angels to dwell in, We would

have sent down to them an angel from Heaven as an apostle.’”50

Such an idea of a “proper place,” whereby a world contaminated by

disharmony is set apart from a world beyond that nonetheless produces

impulses toward perfection in the former, means that Muhammad—like

all other prophets —must remain perfectly human. Other apostles, there-

fore, can only respond humbly and affirmatively to suspicions of their

human normalcy, proclaiming their astonishment that such a point is anissue at all.51 Subsequently, the prophet is explicitly relieved of individual

responsibility for his community by being forbidden to assume the role of

guardian (wakil ), being told instead to be nothing more than simply one

who warns (nadhir ).52

In this case, reduced prophetic responsibility is consistent with the de-

sire for the effacement of distinct and potentially disharmonious individ-

ualities, which God himself was protesting. The passion for communal

harmony requires an exemplary altruism that borders on self-sacrifice.For instance, in his last cries of despair and compassion, the estranged

Noah calls upon his people to destroy him personally if such an act would




result in social good, displaying thereby a heroic trust in both Allah and

the tribe.53 Here, it is the duty of the messenger to remain socially relevant

at all cost and to maintain a bridge of communication with his brethren,

to the point of martyrdom. Along with his followers, he is further in-

structed to repair the communication damage caused by his early vocal

eccentricity by strictly following a nonrepulsive course of preaching.54

Following that strategy, the Qur’an even sought a temporary ideologi-

cal truce that was originally expressed in the surah of al-Kafirun, which

did not call upon idolaters to do any more than leave the Muslims in

peace with their newly discovered faith, in return for the latter’s abandon-

ment of their insistence on their ideological hegemony in the commu-

nity.55

Meccan society, as a whole, apparently had little desire for a totalideological war against Muhammad and his followers over spiritual hege-

mony, a hegemony that was inconsistent with the pluralistic ethic under-

pinning the function of the idols. According to al-Tabari, when the

Qurayshan chiefs complained to Abi Talib about his nephew’s divisive

proclamations, they showed little interest in winning Muhammad back to

their faith: “Let him quit insulting our Gods,” they offered, “and we will

leave him alone with his God.”56 According to different accounts, the

aforementioned surah of al-Kafirun was revealed in response to even

more generous offers by Qurayshans, namely, that all Meccans, Muslims

and non-Muslims alike, worship the idols one year and Allah the next, or

that the entire community worship everything it knew without distinc-

tion: Muhammad’s Allah and the idols simultaneously.57 In other words

Allah, who had long been accepted as a divine concept, could be easily

integrated into existing ontotheology by being assigned the status of a

somewhat more prominent idol. The pluralistic impulse of the pagan tra-dition was malleable enough to absorb Allah’s idea within it, even though

it had no place for a hegemonic deity, much less for an arbitrarily selected

messenger of God.

Thus, regardless of his wishes, the prophet found himself acting almost

exclusively within the bounds of existing social structure for much of his

tenure in Mecca. Sira sources (traditional biographies of the prophet) are

unanimous in reporting that the branch of Quraysh to which he belonged,

Banu Hashim, and in particular his eminent uncle Abi Talib, shielded himfrom abuse while other less socioeconomically fortunate Muslims bore

the brunt of humiliation and mistreatment. But more significantly, not




many members of Muhammad’s clan became Muslims. Abi Talib himself

declined the invitation to convert to Islam, citing reasons that had more

to do with his social status in the community than with theology.58 (On

the other hand, clannish solidarity produced legendary recruits, such as

Muhammad’s cousin Hamza, who announced his conversion to Islam

without having harbored any prior theological convictions while thun-

dering his outrage at the ill-treatment of Muhammad by his infamous ad-

versary Abi Jahl.)

Working within the bounds of existing social structure gradually over-

shadowed early Meccan Islam with clannish perceptions, and at the same

time it cut off communicative links between Muslims and the rest of

Quraysh. This ensuing closure is symbolized in a (premature) Qur’anicconclusion that whatever could be done had been done: “Can you make

the deaf hear, or guide the blind or those in gross error? Whether We take

you hence or let you live to see Our threats fulfilled, We shall surely take

vengeance on them. Therefore hold fast that which is revealed to you: you

are on a straight path.”59

This rigidification of the frontiers roughly coincided with an initially

broadly based conclusion among Quraysh that Muhammad’s protective

kin, Banu Hashim and Banu ‘Abd l-Muttaleb, had earned themselves total

social and economic exclusion. According to the lore, the rest of Quraysh

resolved that marriages and commerce could no longer take place with

the two clans. Instigated by Muhammad’s infamous uncle Abi Lahab, who

defected from his own Banu Hashim, the confederated Qurayshans af-

fixed a declaration of ostracism to the wall of the haram. The ostracism,

which collapsed after three years, was porous in any case, as evidenced by

reports concerning sporadic communication between the clans through-out those years.60 There was a growing realization that Muhammad’s ec-

centricity did not warrant such harsh treatment for his clan, along with a

growing suspicion that a few merchants, notably Abi Lahab and some of

Banu Umayyah, had benefited economically from the boycott against the

Hashemites, even at the expense of smaller clans that had agreed to par-

ticipate in their exclusion.

In addition, the network of nasab relations that had developed between

the branches during the years of sedentarization in Mecca made any suchexclusion impossible to impose. The city was no longer a Bedouin society

where nasab lines possessed (at least in imagination) transhistorical clarity




and distinction. In the city, the myth of distinct nasab lines needed only an

attempt at exclusion to make evident its meaninglessness.61 According to

the lore, when some Qurayshans with affinities to the Hashemites decided

to tear down the declaration of exclusion, they went to the wall of the

haram only to find out that moths had devoured every word in it that en-

tailed injustice, transgression, and communal disharmony, leaving intact

only the name of Allah (which was routinely used by Quraysh to open

contractual statements).62 In attributing the end of the isolation to the will

of Allah, this version of the story avoids admitting the unbelievers’ capa-

city to rectify injustice of their own volition.

On the other hand, the termination of the boycott made more pressing

the point that the community was capable of reuniting on principles other than Islam. The entire affair began and ended in a strictly tribal manner,

with little reference to the theological novelty that had ostensibly origi-

nated the friction. As the crisis was settling, there was an evident tendency

to minimize the theological substance of the affair. Muhammad was fac-

ing arguments to the effect that the whole matter was not worth a social

split, such as the assertion that Quraysh had always worshipped Allah

through his “daughters,” namely, the idols.

For Muhammad and the Muslims, the removal of the ostracism pre-

sented pressure toward a synthesis, since the rapprochement could not be

rejected simply because it occurred without the triumph of Islam. The

legend of the moths notwithstanding, one glaring result of the affairs was

that the infidels showed themselves to be capable of recognizing their

error without converting to Islam. The revelation of the “Satanic verses,”

which resulted from this tension, was introduced in the Qur’an by a con-

ciliatory tone indicating an unmistakable desire to remove the animosity of former times. After excusing Muhammad’s lack of choice in being the

carrier of God’s message and making further overtures by a rare permis-

sion of “minor sins,”63 the surah proceeded to offer a remarkable conces-

sion, which was eventually to be rescinded by Muhammad, who traced it

to demonic intervention in the transmission of God’s words. The two

Satanic verses were to be the only recorded departure from monotheism,

as they dignified the two most important Meccan idols by ratifying their

intercessionary credentials with God.64

According to the sira, the entire community, Muslims and non-Muslims

alike, prostrated themselves at the conclusion of the surah. This remark-




able show of unity could have dramatically altered the course of Islam had

it been allowed to stand. However, the bases of such a unity were soon to

be made clear to Muhammad, as the infidels relayed to him what they had

understood from the revelation:“Now we know that Allah is the One who

gives life and causes death, and that He is the One who creates and gives

sustenance, but these deities of ours will intercede for us with Him. As

you have made an allowance [for them], we are with you [in faith].”65

Thus, though the Satanic verses could lead to communal unity and har-

mony, they did so at the cost of further expanding pagan spiritual plural-

ism, accomplishing thereby the opposite of what the notion of a spiritual

communion safeguarded by a monotheistic God had entailed.

Thus, the theological grounds for deleting the Satanic verses are clear.Less clear, however, are the sociological grounds. More precisely, the ques-

tion is why, given a choice between social reunion and undiluted theologi-

cal purity, did the latter choice prevail? At the level of discourse, at least

one fundamental reason can be detected. The pronouncement of the

grounds for unity in the form of a Qur’anic recitation returned the dis-

course to a theological sphere, which had been largely ignored through-

out the ordeals of boycott and reunion. The departure from the imme-

diacy of the social into theological discourse revealed the temporality of

social events, including the prevailing atmosphere of social reunion. This

is a classic example of the societal unpredictability of ideological dis-

courses, in which advocates of an ideology set in motion processes whose

implications they do not fully comprehend. Their initial transsocial theo-

logical immersion caused early Muslims to become oblivious to questions

of immediate social relevance. Struggling to be readmitted on the basis of

habitual traditional connections, they lost track of the theological sourceof their early social estrangement. Redeploying theological discourse once

they were invited to belong with that distinction, they discovered the full

range of the logic their estrangement. If the social rapprochement was to

result in a theological one, as Muhammad sought in an-Najm—and espe-

cially in the deleted verses—then the “rapprochement” meant no more

than the declaration by Allah of his uselessness, pronouncing thereby to

the Muslims the futility of their continued estrangement from society for

something as trivial as a God who had always existed in the collective con-sciousness, a God who could easily be persuaded by the stones that the

community was already serving.




In the orthodox verses replacing the Satanic ones praising pagan

stones, the stones are pronounced to be no more than subjectively chosen

“names” with no essential authority vested in them.66 The subjectivity of

man himself seems thus to consist of establishing relations to objects by

“merely” naming them. Naming, then, signifies a relationship to an object

that designates its existence, without an essential experience of its truth.

The pagans are denounced, therefore, not for naming as such but for al-

lowing the activity of naming to substitute for thinking of and experienc-

ing the nature of objects in the world. This being the nature of subjec-

tivity, it is then questioned as a valid regulator of belief: Man cannot, by

his own desires, assign to himself a deity of his liking. The deity has to

come from outside of society, from above it, and objectively impose itself on man, since the latter, having proven himself to be an imperfect source

of harmony, could no longer be entrusted with visibly manufacturing a

deity that is likely to be imperfect as well.

The facts that many Muslims were willing to endure the agony of dis-

content and find themselves subjected to unusual moral questioning,

mockery, harassment, and isolation and that many of them were willing

to leave the city and settle far away in Abyssinia indicate the level of ideo-

logical investment that the “Satanic verses” summarily annulled. On the

other hand, the deletion of the verses and the loss of the temporary dis-

play of unity pronounced a realization that the conflict was irremediable.

For the Muslims, that meant that ideology had to guide sociability and

that ideology should never again appear to be moved by sociability. Indeed,

at a later stage, the Qur’an explicitly rejected any possibility of harmony

resulting from Satanic interjection, pointing out in the process what it

saw as a state of extreme dissension among the infidels.67

That move occa-sioned a gradual shift in the idea of harmony to a conception of harmony

as being strictly within a Muslim community, transcending inherently

schismatic tribalism, which—as epitomized by the hijra —was eventually

pronounced to have lost its claim as the most normative embodiment of

social solidarity.68

The classic sources chronicle an ill-advised return from Abyssinia by

the Muslims either shortly before or around the same time as the lifting

of the boycott against the Hashemites.69 These two processes, which co-incided with a short-lived easing of tensions, led, as outlined above, to a

quick discovery of the magnitude of the actual schism. The reinvigoration




of the theological discourse caused not only the highlighting of religious

rather than tribal lines of demarcation. It subsequently entailed a reexam-

ination of traditional standards of individual worth on the basis of where

ideological success was registered. The Qur’an itself registered this reori-

entation, as it reproached the prophet for his unwarranted insistence on

devoting his energies to the largely futile effort to recruit the traditionally

honorable society members while almost ignoring the weak. The surah of

‘Abasa is the clearest illustration of this reexamination, as it denounced

Muhammad, the messenger of Allah, for ignoring repeated requests to re-

cite the Qur’an by an ignoble blind man, as Muhammad was in the midst

of a promising dialogue with a tribal notable. The surah is interesting not

only for its manifestation of divine displeasure with the prophet’s con-duct, but also because the Qur’an here addresses not Muhammad but the

community at large in drawing conclusions from this valuable lesson.70 In

some sense, such a reorientation reflected a recognition of the fact that

only a few of the socially prestigious followers of Muhammad stayed with

him in Mecca throughout the years of persecution, when he was left with

only the most helpless and miserable among the believers.71

It is possible, in principle at least, to identify in the nature of this

wretched crowd certain venues that could enable the group or the mes-

sage to reenter normal society. In one pre-Islamic ode, Tarafa, as the tribe

gathers at his graveside (beginning c. 93), addresses the crowd in a way

that effects a redistribution of the network of speakers and listeners. The

poet here no longer delivers his discourse to figures of authority in the

tribe; rather, he speaks to its less-powerful components (the daughter of

Ma‘bad, for instance). As he nears the end of his wanderings and reaches

his end, the expelled poet expresses a final hope that his name would beredeposited with the tribe in a way that would be free of the play of power,

that his name would signify more than simply glamorous credentials, in-

habiting instead more salient, gentle, and tranquil moments within an

everlasting collective memory.

In a gesture that is closer than Tarafa’s to Muhammad’s predicament,

Noah expresses the feelings of a prophet surrounded by an ignominious

crowd that he had not specifically intended to be restricted to. Among the

recorded criteria according to which Noah’s people rejected him wasthe very low social position of his followers.72 But though Noah responds

by refusing to dissociate himself from the socially obscure believers, he




hesitates, interestingly, to strongly defend them either. In fact, he does not

defend them at all, stating merely that they would face Allah’s judgment if

they had committed any wrongs of which he had no knowledge.73 In the

same context, Noah asserts that the fundamental reason for his inability

to drive away such believers is his status simply as one who warns, with

limited responsibilities. This passive acceptance of all who would sub-

mit to the faith is transformed into an active posture of inclusion with

the surah of ‘Abasa, in which Muhammad is commanded to approach all

members of his community equally, manifesting thereby a behavior ex-

emplary of the order to prevail in a united and just Mecca.

In much of the early Qur’an, distinct wealth was often seen as a source

of disharmony, but only to the extent that it was not placed under Allah’stutelage. In the Meccan surah of al-Kahf, a sociotheological confrontation

between a rich unbeliever and a poor believer ends, characteristically,

with the rich man being stripped by Allah of his continued enjoyment of

the fruits of his possessions.74 But the punishment is far from being fatal

or even irreversible, as the rich man comes to regret his earlier indiffer-

ence to the faith. Interestingly enough, however, the poor man asks for no

share for himself in the rich man’s abundant gardens. He merely asks

Allah for better gardens than those of the wealthy man, which he wishes

to become barren. In the meantime, he denounces in the rich man noth-

ing other than his refusal to (at least verbally) recognize the source of his

bounties. The rich man is never denounced for being uncharacteristically

wealthy, nor for excluding the poor from his unusually rewarding private

property. Neither does the poor man ask to share in such wealth, as would

have been the case among the nomadic tribes. In fact, the poor man is

never portrayed as being compensated at all; there is merely an allusion toa reward in the life to come in heaven. The clear message here concerns

wealth and not poverty. The rich man is the background against which all

social lessons are drawn. His very existence seems to be the whole issue.

He is rich because of Allah’s (unexplained) generosity to him. His indif-

ference to such a fact, taught through the tongue of the deprived man,

commences his immiseration. But again, he is never thrown mercilessly

into the blazing fires of hell; at the end, he is portrayed as an almost re-

pentant man, whereafter his story ends abruptly. In other instances, theMeccan Qur’an seemed to appeal shamelessly to the upper classes, whose

very existence in the world alluded to God’s activity and potential:




God makes this comparison. On the one hand there is a helpless slave,

the property of his master. On the other, a man on whom We have be-

stowed Our bounty, so that he gives of it both in private and public. Are

the two equal?

. . . God also makes this comparison. Take a dumb and helpless man,

a burden on his master: Wherever he sends him he returns with empty

hands. Is he as good as he that enjoins justice and follows a straight

path?75

When the functions narrated in such seemingly strange comparisons are

examined more closely, it appears that they contrast not rich and poor

but, rather, notions of usefulness versus uselessness. The growth of in-

equality is significant not because of its intrinsic evilness but because it

entails a possibility of reducing human usefulness and worth and magni-

fying the concern with the comparative value of human action.76 Distinct

wealth is thus variably explained as a “test,”77 a divine reward awaiting ac-

knowledgment,78 and a source of evilness and transgression.79 But if Allah

was the source of wealth, and if wealth was the source of evil on earth,

then Allah would be the original source of evil. Allah responds to the pos-

sibility of such a chain of thought by simply confirming the inevitableconclusion of that mercilessly straightforward logic: “When We resolve

to destroy a city, We first [command] those of its people who live in com-

fort [so that they commit grave sins in it. Whence Our judgment is vin-

dicated], and We raze that city to the ground.”80

That astoundingly deterministic language does not, however, entail the

encasement of Islam as a religion of the poor. Rather, by being framed in

terms of individual distinction, the discourse on inequality habituates

noncollective modalities of rapprochement. Thus, the people of Mecca

would not inhabit hell and paradise according to clan membership but,

rather, according to individually determined credentials of faith. This po-

tential, though redressing the disharmonizing reality of growing seden-

tary inequality and fragmentation, nonetheless presents an uncomforta-

ble logical consequence: The disunited society in this world will become

even more so after the Day of Judgment. Society, therefore, cannot enter-

tain a harmonious totality at any given time. This realization apparently preceded the evolution of the notion of the umma, coming at a moment

when the prophet himself was aware that many “good” Qurayshans (for




example, Abi Talib) declined to join Islam. The heartening goodness

shown by many idol-worshipping Qurayshans when they lifted the boy-

cott against the Hashemites added further complications to this image of

dual accountability along lines of faith versus lack of it. Could all those

infidels, whose moral character was obviously diverse, be thrown into a

blazing hell of fire that almost burst with rage as it consumed them?

At some points, the Qur’an entertained the possibility that not all un-

believers were equal in guilt, as it depicted wrangling among them in hell

regarding the higher responsibility of their “leaders” for bringing upon

them that unbearable fate, where some of them would ask Allah to double

the punishment of those who were responsible for misguiding them.81

When Allah acknowledged that non-Muslims were not uniform in theirwrongdoing, he pondered as well the possibility that not all Muslims were

uniform in their submission to him either. Classical sources abound with

stories of defection and repentance among Muhammad’s followers. Some

joined before others, and some showed more dedication and endurance

than others. At one point, Allah acknowledged the fact by constructing a

hierarchy among the Muslims in paradise itself, a project that was quickly

abandoned, however.82 Though the hierarchy of the otherworld pro-

nounced a sort of acknowledgment of differential suffering, faith, and

transgression, the more important mission was to actually erase such dif-

ferentiations, to construct a paradise in which all believers “will pass from

hand to hand” a plenitude of blessings.83 As a now ideologically distinct

community, the faithful were to be one united people, as bound together

as an ancient Bedouin tribe, but on a larger and more sophisticated scale:

They were now to be one “umma.”

the boundaries of the umma

As a term referring to the ideal community, the concept of umma meta-

morphosed in meaning several times while it was being added to the early

Islamic discourse. At various points, it was couched in terms of tribal and

transtribal bonds, used in reference to the population of Mecca regardless

of belief, to the followers of all prophets, and to the Muslim community

at large. The standards of solidarity prevailing in such an ideally unitedsociety were frequently altered or redefined. At one point, the Qur’an re-

vealed to Muhammad that on the Day of Judgment, humankind would be




assembled according to their umma category, but it did not elaborate on

what the concept exactly meant.84 Elsewhere, he was assured that because

of the wisdom of Allah, humanity will not become one umma of unbe-

lievers.85 And though at some points the umma linked Muslims to Jews

and Christians as descendants of a single imagined family of brotherly

prophets, it was also used to condemn the Christians for their wrangling

factionalism and general failure to establish the ideal umma in the world.86

Nonetheless, with its main obsession being the overthrow of pagan plu-

ralism, the Qur’an refrained from diverting valuable energy from this

central task, accepting in the process the possibility of monotheistic plural-

ism (including Christians and Jews) as long as the diversity of its texts

could be traced to a single source: “Do not follow their desires, but say [instead]: ‘I believe in all the scriptures that God has revealed. I am com-

manded to exercise justice among you. God is our Lord and your Lord.

We have our own works and you have yours; let there be no argument be-

tween us. God will bring us all together, for to Him we shall return.’”87

This notion of umma is prefigured in pre-Islamic poetry, which spoke

of times of unusually intense and lengthy tribal conflicts. Poets such as

Zuhair and Labid are prominent in this regard, each displaying an entitle-

ment to a transtribal moral authority expressed through distinct poetics.

Though the notion of umma itself is hardly used in such poetry, one en-

counters efforts to construct a system of harmony that encompasses “for-

eignness.” This is evident in Labid’s ode, where the identification of quar-

reling referents is less important than the general resolution of disputes

(for example, c. 70: “And oft in an unfamiliar muster of many strangers /

where gifts were hoped for, and the voice of reproach was feared”).88 Here,

Labid describes a location of great acrimony, “unfamiliar” (majhulah) interms of population, cause, and outcome of the conflict. There is a location

(or event) where (when) angry people are exchanging wild threats. Like

the anonymous enemy pursued earlier in the ode, this gathering (or the

battlefield) is strange, unspecifiable, unnamable, undefinable, unbounded

by characterizations.89 Unlike ‘Amru’s confident voice, which presents the

tribal adversary clearly and described them as having committed specific,

punishable deeds, the enemy here refuses to emerge.

The inconclusive confrontation gives way, unglamorously, to a sceneresonating with the image of a caring community, toward which one owes

a duty that encompasses more than the readiness to take up arms in its




defense. Here, the poor, the weak, the wayfarer, the orphan—in short, all

rejects and outcasts—are invited in (together with the “neighbor”) to a

feast presided over by the poet. Moving further away from scenes of po-

tential confrontations and threats in the world outside, this scene inaugu-

rates an inward movement, toward an enlarged sense of home. The grand

feast that announces such an expanded togetherness establishes the basis

for a subsequent rethinking of the sources (the whys) of the earlier disori-

entative, futile, directionless, unsettling, long chase after an elusive enemy.

Expanded togetherness in Labid’s ode acts as a shield for such a contem-

plative activity. The festive relief from the wilderness at the conclusion is

used as an opportunity to reformulate ideas of sociability, from the van-

tage point of a nonalien location where such thinking could flow, freefrom the fear of the unknown, a fear lurking in the unfamiliarity of other-

ness, in the renounced expanse of emptiness outside of the home, in the

undecidability of darkness, and in the pointlessness of the strangers’ feud.

The expanded home becomes the model for addressing transtribal

anonymities in the outside world, a model whereby the multitudes of

such a world are ordered and its pluralist composition is ascertained.

What is to become of the world outside is what is becoming of the ex-

panded abode. Thus, toward the end of Labid’s great ode, we reach what

resembles a code of morals or justice, consisting of ethics, behaviors, and

duties incumbent upon belonging to this kind of community of strangers.

There is the image of an assembly, of a community in a state of meaning-

ful togetherness, encompassing both the tribe and its outside. Like the

umma that was to coalesce at a later point in Medina, Labid’s assembly is

a site of resolutions and a new form of just governance: Its conditions

of being are still those of claims and counterclaims (very much like thatconflict-ridden “unfamiliar muster of many strangers”), but here there is

an arbitrator to dispense justice (c. 78–80). Unlike Zuhair’s general wis-

dom, Labid’s comes with a mechanism for effecting the code. As presum-

ably the last of the great pre-Islamic poets, Labid offers a significantly

different vision of communal organization and hints at the desire for ex-

perimenting with expanded yet still vague notions of belonging.

In Muhammad’s case, the actual expansion of the domain of Islam be-

gins most clearly with the second bay‘ah (pact), when the Ansar declaredtheir readiness to shield the prophet upon migrating to Medina. The

bay‘ah inaugurated a cautious yet ultimately successful expansion of Islam,




which until then had been confined to a besieged community in Mecca

and whose earlier attempts to escape such confines, such as Muhammad’s

distressing ordeal in Ta’if, met with even more pronounced failure. The

second bay‘ah, however, was more overshadowed by tribal than theologi-

cal paradigms. According to the sira, Muhammad barely spoke during the

deliberations, his alliance with the Ansar being instead negotiated by an

infidel uncle. Unlike the more ethical conditions of the first pact with the

Ansar, those of the second one spelled out little more than a declaration of

war on any common enemies. Tribal alliance figured here more than the

constitution of a single umma, signified by Muhammad’s original absten-

tion from assuming the leadership of the Ansar, delegating the task in-

stead to twelve Medinian notables, while reserving for himself leadershipover the Meccan Muslims (Muhajirun). But as far as Medina was con-

cerned, the selection of the twelve overseers (nuqaba’ ) was tantamount to

forging a pathbreaking union of the main non-Jewish Medinian tribes.

Although Muhammad was soon to abandon the division of Muslim

leadership between himself and the twelve overseers, its introduction

nevertheless could be construed as marking a suspicion—on the part of

Muhammad at least—that Islam was not as clearly meant for Medina as it

was for Mecca. Once in the city, he reportedly pleaded, speaking for the

Muhajirun, “Lord, make us love this town as much as You made us love

Mecca, and even more so,”90 clearly indicating that Mecca continued to be

the point of reference.

In addition, the enshrinement of Islam in Medina before Muhammad’s

migration was probably made even easier by the prophet’s absentee sta-

tus, because he could neither be seen “eating food and walking about the

marketplace” as he was in Mecca, nor could he be implicated in the longhistory of local tribal tensions. This aloofness from profane associations

was maintained for a while; sira sources mention that Muhammad, upon

entering Medina, turned down various clan’s offers of residence, leaving

the decision to his unguided she-camel, whose meandering path and

choice of resting place was attributed to divine commandment.91 Follow-

ing blind destiny here establishes the foundation for transtribal solidarity,

since the decision regarding prophetic residence in a multitribal minefield

is taken away from human as well as prophetic subjectivities.Gradually, the Medinian Qur’an moved away from its Meccan cen-

tricity, expressing in its place an ecstasy at discovering the possibility of




transtribal union. This paralleled a gradual consolidation of the umma in

Medina, as one of the first orders of business for Muhammad in the new

town was to “fraternize” (mu’akhah) the believers by assigning to each of

his Meccan followers a “brother in belief” from among the Ansar. In the

same line, the separation of leadership over the two communities was

abandoned as soon as the first of the twelve Medinian overseers died, with

Muhammad declaring himself to be the new naqib (overseer) of his con-

stituents rather than delegating the post to someone else from the de-

ceased man’s clan.

Though the fraternization indicated a higher level of commonality

than “alliance,” it did not mean a complete overturn of the laws of clan-

nish bonding. As it strove to account for the nature of the new and diversecommunity, the Qur’an made a clear distinction between the Muhajirun

and Muslims who chose to stay in Mecca, subordinating the relation be-

tween the two groups to that between the Muhajirun and Ansar, who were

more distant from each other in terms of lineage. The nature of the new

bond was first seen in terms of a synthesis between the feeling of distinc-

tion from other societies and blood lineages: “The unbelievers give aid

and comfort to each other. If you fail to do likewise, there will be disorder

in the land and great corruption. . . . Those that have since embraced the

Faith and fought with you—they too are your brothers; although accord-

ing to the Book of God those who are bound by ties of blood are nearest

to one another.”92

The hijra meant that Mecca as a whole was defined as a site of evil. This

all-inclusive definition, which laid down the foundation for the war,

meant that the Muhajirun had to dissociate themselves from their

brethren in faith who had stayed in the city, but without equating themwith its infidels. The synthetic formula was to reduce them to the status of

tribal allies, the obligation toward whom being no higher than that to-

ward other social units with which the Muslims had treaties. From then

on, the notion of blood relations was gradually subordinated to an in-

creasingly ideologized and organized umma that was becoming aware of

its distinct and original nature in the land. Earlier Qur’anic instructions

to approach idolaters with patience and humility sharply contrasted with

emergent instructions in Medina, where at one point believers were for-bidden to befriend “the enemies of Allah” or even to entertain warm feel-

ings toward the infidels in their immediate families. At some point in that




new exposition, the Qur’an found it worthwhile to assert a point that

might otherwise have been missed, namely, that kin relations counted for

nothing on the Day of Judgment.93

Along with such an overhaul of relations, the Medinian Qur’an began

to reinterpret tales of earlier prophets that had emphasized their pre-

ordained and inescapable communal belonging. The most significant of

such reinterpretations was perhaps that concerning the story of the patri-

arch Abraham, who in the Meccan Qur’an was portrayed as leaving his

infidel father on good terms and even promising to intercede for him be-

fore Allah.94 In the context of Medina, however, the Qur’an now explicitly

instructed the believers not to emulate that particular episode of the story

of Abraham.95

The context of such emergent teachings and reinterpre-tations brought about not only the rigidification of the boundaries sepa-

rating Muslims and non-Muslims but also the need to consolidate the

unity among the transtribal Muslim community of Aus, Khazraj, and the

Muhajirun, now territorially confined to a city from which non-Muslim

tribes were being gradually expelled. The fact that Meccan Muslims were

not uniformly ready to follow Muhammad in the hijra and the fact that

the population of Medina continued to harbor the not-so-distant memory

of previous animosities among tribes now united in faith led to an ac-

knowledgment that conflicts could indeed occur within this umma as well.

Should this recur, however, such conflicts were now to be resolved through

a standard method:

If two parties of believers take up arms the one against the other, make

peace between them. If either of them commits aggression against the

other, fight against the aggressors till they submit to God’s judgment.

When they submit, make peace between them in equity and justice;

God loves those who exercise justice.

The believers are a band of brothers. Make peace among your

brothers.96

Elsewhere, conflicts within the necessarily harmonious umma were

seen as either illusions or as the result of unintentional mistakes.97 Thus, a

Muslim who kills another, for example, is not automatically thrown into

the raging fire of hell; rather, he is allowed one of four ways to quickly erase the happening from social memory, listed in an interesting order:

He may free a Muslim slave and pay “Islamic” blood-money (diyyah) to




the family of the victim (with a divine recommendation that the family

give it away in alms), or he may fast for two consecutive months in

penance. If the Muslim victim was from a clan that was an enemy of the

faith, the diyyah requirement was waived, but it was reinstituted, in addi-

tion to freeing the slave, if the victim belonged to a non-Muslim clan with

which Muslims had a treaty. The novelty of this compensatory scheme

consists partially in its simultaneous incorporation of the traditional

diyyah—which generally sufficed by itself otherwise—and expanding the

range of compensatory actions beyond the idea of “private” right. A freed

Muslim slave supplemented the umma with one life that substituted for

the one lost to the umma in an episode of inner conflict. Within the plu-

ralist communalistic perspective sanctified by independent idols and con-ceived along the lines of autonomous clans, the family of a victim could

not benefit from a freed slave, but it obviously could from the diyyah. By

contrast, under the emergent umma conditions, the perpetrator would pay

back the entire umma for the crime, and no longer exclusively the kinfolk

of the victim.

The introduction of more elaborate modes of punishment must be

understood in the context of this redefinition of the nature of sociability.

Here, a just punishment is not a straightforward restitution or revenge; it

must above all preclude general societal futility. The modality of penance

allows the very acts of conflict to strengthen the umma within which they

take place. It is in this context that the downgrading of pointless revenge

as a guide to retributary behavior can be understood. But it is also in this

context that one can understand why the socially impotent, self-torturing

practice of fasting ( for God ) for two consecutive months was left as a last

option, to be used only when the Muslim perpetrator was unable to fulfillmore socially communicative retributary requirements.

Thus, for the Muhajirun and the Ansar, “Islam” gradually came to be a

regulator of inner conflicts, as it simultaneously grew to assume the status

of the milestone that marked the boundaries of exterior conflict. But such

was not the case for the Muslim Bedouins, for whom allegiance to Islam

meant little more than a declaration of alliance with a powerful sedentary

community. The fact that such sedentary Muslims were periodically

involved in raiding the caravans of Mecca was not, after all, that dissimi-lar from what Bedouins had traditionally understood as familiar ghazw

(plundering), which for them hardly needed theological justification.




Furthermore, the Bedouin socioeconomy was inherently incompatible

with the central control that was gradually being experimented with in

Medina, an incompatibility that had imploded the Kinda kingdom before

Muhammad’s time and seriously threatened the nascent Islamic polity

after him through Musaylimah’s revolt.98 Though the Muslim Bedouins

continued to be relatively out of reach of the umma as it was being consti-

tuted, they were nevertheless of strategic value as military allies. During

the first few years after the migration from Mecca, the Muslims could

count on the allegiance of so many tribes in the western and northern

coastal areas of the peninsula that they could severely undermine the se-

curity of the trade route to Syria—an irreplaceable lifeline for the Meccan

economy.99

In spite of the geographic separation, the umma was beginning to be

imagined along the lines of uniform practices and rituals that were ex-

pected to act as markers of faith everywhere. This expectation, which

many Muslim nomads frequently failed to fulfill, arose as the geography

of the umma became less certain because of its expansion into nomadic

territory. One interesting report even seems to indicate that the prophet

did not know where Bedouin Muslims lived: “The messenger of Allah,

peace be upon him, never raided a people whom he had targeted until

dawn; then, if he heard a call to prayer, he would hold still, and if he did

not hear [it], he would attack.”100

Muslim historians trace the “conversion” of the Bedouins back to

Muhammad’s later period in Mecca, where he regularly proselytized

among Arabs from throughout the peninsula during the pilgrimage sea-

son. The same sources also report that when he ventured to visit the

Bedouins, Muhammad was consistently met with rejection, scorn, andmockery. The stronger the core sedentary Muslim community became,

and the more willing it was to raid for acquisition, the more the nomads

proceeded to form alliances with it and express them through verbal al-

legiance to Islam. Having reneged several times on promises of aid to

sedentary Muslims at times of crisis, fighting only when it suited them,

nomads were sharply denounced in the Qur’an in words that avowedly

suspected their motivation to join the faith.101

Nomadic life remained otherwise outside of the sociological concernsof the new faith. As the Qur’an and the sedentary Muslims became entan-

gled with experiences emanating from urban and transtribal forms of




union, Bedouin life stood out unexplained, unaccounted for, and unin-

structed. Like all other societies that the sedentary Muslims did not know,

the nomads were called upon to migrate to those locations where Muslims

lived, so that they could be incorporated into the harmony of the seden-

tary community, which until then had been the only real success story of

Islam in the peninsula. Historical reports mention that, in his instructions

to the Muslim army that was marshaled to Mu’tah—shortly before the

conquest of Mecca—Muhammad told its commanders to call upon the

infidels whom they encountered to join Islam and to migrate from their

homes to the “home of the Muhajirun,” so that they might be incorporat-

ed into the body of the umma with some certitude. If they accepted Islam

but chose to stay where they lived, the instructions went on, the terms of relation with them would be similar to those prevailing with the “Bedouin

Muslims,” with a share of the spoils of war going to them only in those in-

stances in which they fought alongside the Muslims of Medina.102 In this

respect, continuing to live apart from the tangible umma indicated not

only suspicious theological commitment but, moreover, lack of suscepti-

bility to organizational control. As the sedentary community revealed it-

self to be the stable core in the social life of the faith, the spontaneous

sense of closeness and proximity was seen to be one of the most impor-

tant virtues of the umma , so much so that it became difficult to imagine

true believers existing without being empirically touched by a prophet

who belonged to it.103

hudaybiyyah and the paradigms of the umma

The empirical definition of the umma was to a large extent foreshadowedby the experience of Islam in Mecca, and the early feeling that Islam

showed for distinct belonging of the umma in a sanctuary that excluded

its inhospitable, terror-ridden surroundings. The hijra, while creating

another tangible community, inaugurated a more complicated system of

relations in which figured both distant allies and distant Mecca, which

continued to function as a spiritual magnet for the Arabs. One of the

most interesting episodes in the story of Islam at that point concerned the

dynamics by which a synthesis was forged between all such facets andcommunities of faith, a synthesis that did not fail to unsettle theological

purists and show that the larger and less tangible the umma, the more




polyphonous it became. Such tensions were epitomized in the Sulh al-

Hudaybiyyah, or the Peace of Hudaybiyyah, which was signed between

Muhammad and Mecca almost two years before the fall of the city, and

ended a promising Muslim expedition against it without a fight.

The sources emphasize that Muhammad’s army, consisting of 700 to

1,400 sedentary followers, did not intend to wage war during that epi-

sode. Rather, the force was intended as more of an army of preachers that

would proselytize among the Arabs during their pilgrimage and partici-

pate with them in glorifying Mecca’s haram. The Qurayshans went on

alert, vowing not to let their enemy, with whom they had so much blood-

shed already, enter the city without their explicit and humiliating ap-

proval. The standoff resulted in the Sulh al-Hudaybiyyah, which stipulat-ed, among other conditions, that the war would be halted for ten years,

that individuals in both camps would be free to ally themselves with

whichever side they chose, and that Muhammad and his followers would

postpone their visit to the haram to the following year and would restrict

their stay to three days, during which Quraysh would stand impatiently

vigilant. One important condition that incensed many Muslims was that

Muslim Meccans who thereafter migrated to Medina without the consent

of their guardians were to be sent back to Mecca, while Quraysh was ex-

empted from reciprocating such treatment in the case of Muslims who

defected to Mecca.

Many of the Muslims considered the agreement to be an unwarranted

humiliation, with the faithful giving away much and ending the war in

exchange for almost nothing. (In the sira, the later caliph ‘Umar Ibn

al-Khattab largely personified the opposition to the treaty among the

Muslims.) At first glance, Muhammad’s concessions at Hudaybiyyah doindeed look perplexing, even if one takes into account strategic calcula-

tions, such as that the fight against Mecca was different from a Bedouin

raid, where the balance of forces is calculated more directly. When negoti-

ating the treaty, Muhammad even agreed to replace the Islamic heading of

“In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful,” with the more

general Qurayshan “In Your name, our Allah,” and to replace the reference

to himself as “Muhammad, the messenger of Allah,” with the more tradi-

tional designation of his name followed by that of his father.The sira condenses the contradictory passions toward Mecca around that

time in an incident that is said to have in some mystical way precipitated




the agreement: Once Muhammad’s army was near Mecca and unable to

decide on a course of action after the march had put the Qurayshans on a

determined and defensive alert, God once more offered a sign. Muhammad’s

she-camel suddenly lowered itself to the ground in the valley of Huday-

biyyah, prompting the prophet to an immediate explanation: “She was

halted by Him who had halted the elephant from Mecca,”104 in reference to

the earlier expedition of the elephant-riding Abyssinians, whose retreat

without a fight was traced earlier in the Qur’an to God’s intervention. Now

that same Allah was to protect Mecca from his own messenger, a messen-

ger whose motives were originally meant to be the exact opposite of those

of Abraha, with his elephants bent on destroying the sacred haram of

Mecca and Abraham. Muhammad, whose year of birth coincides in thesira with that expedition, could only kneel down before the symbol of

Mecca’s greatness and apologize for having appeared to be attacking it in

the same way he had attacked the caravans in the desert, to repent and

grieve for having appeared as an Abyssinian invader, from the likeness

of whose might the city was to be shielded through the tutelage of the

monotheist deity to begin with.

At a different level, the agreement of Hudaybiyyah emerged from the

predicament that Islam, as a social force, had been experiencing since

its departure from Mecca. War caused the spread of Islam in the form of

verbal allegiances (which could mark the possible origin of the verbal

shahadah [pronouncement of belief] as the first pillar of faith), which

could not be ascertained and monitored without the beholders’ migra-

tion to the dwellings of the only community under continuous control,

namely the “home of the Muhajirun.” Confined within the boundaries of

Medina, the Muslims could partially count on their allies, as well as ontheir own force, to sustain a war economy that was growing to obscure the

original mission of the religion. But as a theologically committed force,

not a single tribe was converted to Islam by the force of arms. The ten-

year peace treaty was the outstanding testimony to that fact. To spread the

faith by peaceful means, or at least to reestablish thereby peaceful contacts

with the peninsular Arabs, who continued to revere Mecca, as well as with

Mecca itself, was, after all, the Muslims’ professed motivation for visiting

the haram. According to traditional accounts, such a bargain paid off: TheMuslim ranks multiplied several times over after the agreement, to such

an extent that two years after its inception, Muhammad—using a minor




breach as a pretext—could marshal ten thousand dedicated men to Mecca

and finally capture the city.

But at the time of the agreement, it was not clear whether such a bar-

gain could be expected to pay off, although some Muslims probably re-

garded it more as a way out of the war’s failure to bring to Islam other

converts than the lukewarm and unreliable Bedouins. War, however,

added to the faith an important political dimension. Muhammad was no

longer a lonely prophet but one with a deeply dedicated following in

Medina and with allies elsewhere. The war itself, if unsuccessful in bring-

ing in theologically committed recruits, did at least establish the Muslims

as a force to be taken seriously among the Arabs. Thus, once arms were

laid down, Muhammad could capitalize on the novel facts that the earlierlack of prophetic credentials that had isolated him in Mecca had by then

been almost compensated for by a show of success, endurance, and fol-

lowing and that the societies that had always expected a prophet were

therefore prepared to consider him. At the same time, though many of the

concessions of the agreement appeared unnecessary, they did nonetheless

defuse the tense atmosphere of war to such an extent that Islam could be

considered by minds that were free from presupposed hostility.105

The time of Hudaybiyyah, furthermore, witnessed evident cleavages

in both camps, cleavages that in themselves could have caused a rethink-

ing of the viability of total war. Muhammad, who was painfully aware of

the refusal of the Bedouin Muslims to join the expedition, was further re-

minded of both his belonging in Mecca and the unreliability of his own

forces by a notable Qurayshan negotiator: “O Muhammad! So you have

gathered the medley of people by whom you came back to break the might

of your own tribe. Quraysh has come out [for you], with them are thewomen and the children . . . vowing that you [will] never enter [Mecca]

without their approval. By Allah, I could see those [the Muslims] disband-

ing from around you tomorrow.”106 But it was not only the Muslims

whose ranks were shaky. The same reports mention that the leader of the

Ahabish, one of the non-Qurayshan components of Mecca, protested

against preventing Muhammad and his followers from paying respect to

the haram, reaffirming meanwhile the principle of openness and peace

upon which the city was founded. The reports also mention that theAhabish protected some of Muhammad’s emissaries to Quraysh. Further

cleavages appear in the treatment of negotiators, as some of the Qurayshan




messengers were respected by Muhammad more than others, and like-

wise, the Muslim messenger ‘Uthman Ibn ‘Affan could count on more

honorable treatment in Mecca than another Muslim messenger, ‘Umar

Ibn al-Khattab.

At that juncture, ‘Uthman and ‘Umar represented two opposing para-

digms within the Muslim community. For Quraysh, the difference be-

tween the two had to do with the former’s abundance of notable relations.

That was not a purely accidental difference, for it affected the positions

and worldviews of these two later caliphs. While ‘Uthman, being firmly

rooted in Mecca, represented the visions of most Meccan Muslims like

himself and Muhammad, the relative outsider ‘Umar spoke to most of the

new converts, who were either strangers to Mecca or were held at a disad-vantage within its old socioeconomic rules: the poor, the non-Qurayshan

allies, and the semi-Bedouins. Those sectors compensated for their lack of

power within the social structure of the city by claiming it in the realm of

a theology that held, from their perspective, the only set of ideas that

could stand above the established social order that had nullified their sig-

nificance. Precisely because of its position with regard to the established

social order, the theology could be used to overthrow the social order

rather than to further protect it, an idea condensed in the ‘Uthmanist vi-

sion. In that unpronounced unevenness of vision, the seeds were planted

of the later conflict that was to destroy the Rashidi caliphate, although the

conflict gathered other ingredients while it was maturing.

Realizing theology’s power to affect the established social order re-

inforced the general commitment to it among diverse Muslims. But when

the possibility that the same theology could deal with the established

order in diametrically opposed ways was exposed in Hudaybiyyah (to thesatisfaction of the ‘Uthmanists), the bewildered faction attempted to force

its own purist vision to account for what was happening. Traditional ac-

counts acknowledge a widespread disappointment among the Muslims

after the treaty became known;107 many of them echoed ‘Umar’s incom-

prehension of the entire affair. They could not possibly comprehend the

commitment of Muhammad and the ‘Uthmanists to the “mother of towns”

itself, nor their not-so-inaudible drive to have Allah himself protect what

they thought to be a social order that lacked legitimate ontotheologicalfoundations. Though the ‘Umarist paradigm recognized the unstable

foundations upon which the Meccan socioeconomic order stood, it only




sedentary communities while ordaining to those unreliable allies their

future role, far away :

You [the desert Arabs] thought that the Apostle and the believers would

never return to their people; and with that fancy your hearts were de-lighted. You harbored evil thoughts and thus incurred damnation. . . .

Say to the desert Arabs who stayed behind:“You shall be called upon

to fight a mighty nation, unless they embrace Islam. If you prove obedi-

ent, God will reward you. But if you run away, as you have done before

this, He will inflict upon you a stern chastisement.”115

Thus, significant distinctions were already apparent within the Muslim

community even before the death of the prophet. Though early Islam ac-cepted the preexisting distinction in social order between hadarah and

badawah lifestyles (but no longer recognizing their political independence),

it harbored simultaneously the seeds of unprecedented future ideological

splits among the hadaris themselves, which first came into evidence in the

landmark peace of Hudaybiyyah; the contradictions of various societies

simply regrouped under the mantle of an Islamic umma, where they con-

tinued to galvanize, metamorphose, and develop further discursive cam-

ouflages along their way into forms of explication more multifarious than

those expressed by tribal pluralism.

The success of Islam, and Muhammad, in a land that was not only ex-

pecting prophets but teeming with them stems from the fact that a multi-

tude of modalities of reception compelled the message to synthesize all

the contradictions it had thought of as such once it encountered them

along its way. It was born in the relatively advanced society of Mecca, and

from that vantage point it looked upon the fissions of what it judged to beless-fortunate, brute, or transitional surroundings. It passed judgment on

everything it encountered, filling up the enormous ontological void that

was magnified by the willful self-enclosure of its most important ideologi-

cal alternatives. In other words, it became a “system,” which in a dialectical

fashion created and was re-created by a vast and polyphonous social

order, an order that did not know whom else to ask, among other issues of

life, the question of its own justification.




The Qur’an words, amid the heat of the war against Mecca, revealed a

sense of torment about the raison d’être of the war: “They have hearts they

cannot comprehend with; they have eyes they cannot see with; and they

have ears they cannot hear with. They are like beasts—indeed, they are

more misguided.”1 Apart from the war’s profane and visible association

with the potential for economic remuneration, it remained more lodged in

an incomprehensible resistance of the old system of belief to natural ex-

tinction.2 But while this perception was simmering among the estranged

Muhajirun (Meccan Muslims in Medina), the rest of infidel Quraysh wentabout its business as usual, with no apparent concern for the possibility

that the small raids on its caravans by the former could escalate into a full-

scale war. The difference in attitudes was most evident at the battle of Badr,

the first major confrontation between the two sides, where a Muslim con-

tingent of three hundred warriors defeated a Qurayshan convoy protected

by three times their number. Traditional accounts lengthily portray the

prebattle determination of the Muslims, sharply contrasting it with the

unwillingness of many Qurayshans, who were more traders than war-riors, to engage in a real fight. The hastily marshaled Qurayshan army was

meant largely as a show of strength; its mission was only to camp in the

231

e ight

Austerity, Power, and Worldly Exchange



furnishes the immense background of the two similar grave markers,

where an anonymity of death blurs vision and makes distinctions improba-

ble. Past achievement, human effort, projects, designs, life itself are all so

visibly ephemeral. This fundamentally nomadic conception of natural

death was inherited by the pre-Islamic sedentaries, whose differentiated

socioeconomy was yet to provide a more differentiated idea of natural

death, an idea that would be expected to exist in tandem with the new con-

ceptions of the virtue of status and the introduction of more-stable social

hierarchies. To be sure, the Qur’an itself seems at some points to allude to

an archaic image of death, articulated in terms quite distant from those

postulating it as a total finitude of a normative and coherent subjectivity:

“When they enter it [the hell of fire], their ears, their eyes, and their very skins will testify to their misdeeds. ‘Why did you speak against us?’ they

will say to their skins, and their skins will reply ‘God, who gives speech to

all things, has made us speak. . . . You did not hide yourselves, so that your

ears and eyes and skins could not be made to testify against you.’5

Thus, though disunited as they seek to account for sins, the organs

would still address the self to which they belong as a unit. Here, though

the physical unity of the body is torn asunder by divine power, an ethical

stand-in is kept in place for the purpose of interrogating the source of

sinful acts. Organs are separated and endowed with tongues of their own

in order to give credence to an act of witnessing, which is to be transmit-

ted to a divine court of justice at a later point in time. This procedure is

grounded upon the need to produce a most credible witnessing, especial-

ly in the case of major sins such as fornication.6 In fact, failure to produce

witnesses in such cases could result in those making the accusation being

punished almost as severely as the adulterers themselves, with all theirsubsequent rights to witness being suspended until they repent.7 Even-

tually, they would be torn into conflicting organs, each of which would

testify against the organism as a whole for the ultimate sin of speaking of

unprovable scandals and thereby causing undue social discord.

Here, the entire human body begins to mirror existence itself, as noth-

ing more than an aggregate of disjointed parts, individually controlled

and collectively made into meaningful ensembles by a divine power. The

integrity of physical oneness, much like questions of belief, infidelity, andrepentance, is no longer the sole property of a coherent self. Coherence

here is condensed not in the idea of naturally endowed and physically

Austerity, Power, and Worldly Exchange • 233



referenced subjectivity but in a totality of discoverable acts played in the

context of a game of justice, a game whose players must be testified for

and against by a reliable system of surveillance and witnessing, a system

which, in turn, can be deposited in an assemblage of breakable physical

oneness, unsuspectedly called the self.8

austerity, justice, perishing: moses and ‘ubayd

This notion of human subjectivity, here articulated for the purposes of

anchoring a process of restoring justice and argued in the context of death

and an afterlife, recalls some elements of the pre-Islamic vision of self-

hood. In much of that heritage, and especially from the nomadic point of view, subjective integrity is questioned on the grounds of the austere con-

ditions of life and the recurrent nonheroic, passive exposure to the storms

of fate. In the tradition surrounding the mu’allaqat (odes), one of the

most illustrative cases of this view is the story of ‘Ubayd Ibn l-Abras, the

least known and reportedly most destitute of the great pre-Islamic poets.

In fact, so his story goes, he was not a poet at all. He was an impoverished

wanderer, accompanied in the desolate landscape by his sister and a few

goats. Being a man of neither means nor power, he was prevented from

watering his goats at a well by a certain figure from Banu Malik. Despon-

dent, he departed, agonizing over his fated weakness. Exhausted, he rested

next to his sister in the shadow of a tree. The same man who had kept

them from the water, so the legend goes, saw the siblings sleeping next to

one another. He uttered a disparaging allusion to incest, and his words

found their way to the ears of the poet-to-be. Awakened, he could do no

more than appeal to a God to deliver him justice, since he himself was socompletely disinherited and feeble. Like all those who thus wish to vindi-

cate their cause, he resumed sleeping. Eventually, divine help arrived in

the form of an angel descending from heaven and armed with a “bundle

of poetry” (kubbaton mina l-shi‘r ), which he hurled into the poet’s mouth.

Then, before disappearing, he commanded the poet to rise. When the

poet awoke, he immediately discovered within himself a mass of poetry

that stampeded out of him without control, poetic sentences forming by

themselves out of the flood of words.Here, poetry is produced by itself, and the speaking subject is no more

than a medium. Such a spontaneous, subjectless production of testimony

234 • Austerity, Power, and Worldly Exchange



man from and given him priority over nature, the story of trust was neces-

sarily a story of failure to meet the responsibility. In salvation religions, the

transcendental deity always justified its actions on the basis of man’s fail-

ure in that regard. Thus, the withdrawal of the trust inaugurated the social

aspects of the faith, whereby not merely theology and worship but all the

practical affairs of social life, exchange, and political order were regulated.

It was precisely that grand reorganization of all the details of life that ab-

solved that unjust and ignorant creature of sin, replacing it with an un-

shakable belief in lawful self-righteousness; it was becoming impossible to

be a wrongdoer, because human action no longer emanated from avowed

desire or inner sources of inspiration. When merchants sold and bought in

the marketplace, they sold and bought what Allah had allowed accordingto prescribed rules and congratulated themselves for avoiding what he

prohibited. Many of the prohibitions, though by no means all, do not seem

to have had any meaning other than to serve as a measurement of commit-

ment to the communal faith, a measurement that would allow the faithful

to give other than preordained tribal credence to their social standing and

citizenship. The cosmos itself was organized with built-in signals to allow

for this social exchange to proceed in an orderly fashion: The new moons

were to indicate dates and times of pilgrimage, the day was made for earn-

ing a living, and the night for resting.11

The Qur’anic exchange rules began by sanctifying private wealth but

at the same time strictly rejecting “unnatural” wealth, that is, wealth for

which no labor was visibly exerted. This connection between wealth and

labor was clearly illustrated by the single stroke in which two unrelated

transactions were summarily forbidden: usurping an orphan’s trust fund,

and enlarging charity to the feeble-minded to an extent that would amountto giving away to them wealth that Allah had entrusted to those who had

labored for it.12 In general, many of Muhammad’s reforms of economic

life in Medina were directly aimed at ending speculative activities and

encouraging production, wage labor, land use, and trade in empirically ex-

isting items instead.13 Legitimate exchange meant, above all, the possibility

of “trusting,” which was regulated along the same lines that had occasioned

the procedure laid out for the general restoration of justice: The act of wit-

nessing was of paramount importance in this type of exchange. Once theorphans came of age, their money was to be given back to them in its en-

tirety, while witnesses were present.14 Witnesses were also to be present at




Unlike in ‘Ubayd’s fable, justice here is restored without discursive or

poetic accentuation of the conflict. Here, Moses offers a helping hand in

what may seem to be a minor incident, but the very simplicity of the pic-

ture makes it exceptionally earthly and vivid. Shepherding in desert areas

involves occasional conflicts of claims for the scarce water, which is one of

the main sources of friction within pastoral nomadic societies. The mun-

dane, everyday nature of this conflict calls for no more than an equally

straightforward, nonmiraculous resolution by a passing prophet.

These Qur’anic passages are obviously not as powerful as others deal-

ing with the concept of restoring justice. But the picture they provide is

realistic. They depict a normal Bedouin and semisedentary economic ac-

tivity, introduce one important and real source of disharmony that couldconceivably accompany its practice, and offer a means by which it is re-

solved. Through the entirely traditional means of marriage, the weak are

then attached to nothing less than a herald of invincible justice. For years

thereafter, Moses becomes a humble shepherd, wandering like a Bedouin

who is totally freed from any source of alienation; not only had he re-

stored justice, but he confidently expected not to be wronged in the

future. His explicit announcement of such a prediction clearly addressed

not the immediate nomadic conflict over water but a more original wrong

from which he himself had escaped and to whose source he was to return

at a later stage as a prophet: the unjust, disunited world of the pharaoh. In

this sense, the restoration of harmony in the desert is not part of the logic

of the desert itself but, rather, part of a logic residing outside the desert in

the sedentary setting from which the idea of God was exiled. It is signifi-

cant, in this respect, that though Moses stayed behind in the desert for

many years after the Midian incident, nothing more was heard from orabout him until he returned to the sedentary fold. His story is interrupted,

as though it could flow forth only under conditions of sedentary pain.

In contrast to Moses’s small-scale, self-actualized triumph in the desert,

‘Ubayd’s comparable episode displays the poet as a weakling who is re-

inforced by an exterior source with a poem intended to empower him over

conditions of injustice. The poem itself commences with an extremely

pessimistic and austere opening—which is nonetheless profoundly tradi-

tional in the genre of the mu‘allaqat. To be sure, the traditional opening of standing by the ruins itself seems to be hospitable to the generally ago-

nized nature of ‘Ubayd’s discourse. Unlike many of the other mu‘allaqat,




barrenness effected in ‘Ubayd’s ode—the shortest among the legendary

ten—where nothing is left in place but the glaring severity of unmitigated

nihilism.

‘Ubayd delivers himself therefore without modification. He is defined

not in terms of absolute powerlessness but, rather, in terms of powerless-

ness knowable by virtue of an encounter with a source of power, where-

after this knowledge becomes immutable. His dispossession is presented

as an irremediable condition of existence. One cannot transform what

must be presented as nature. Thus, ‘Ubayd stands by the ruins and de-

clares his alienation from that which he could never attain, whereby

the dispossessed condition of being is absolutized as irreversible nature.

The oppositions between potential possession and actual dispossessionare not presented as belonging to the same temporal dimension; rather,

one condition belongs to the past, which had defined the fallen status of

the present, and the other belongs to the present, which is the impossibility

of past and reclamation. Thus, the present becomes known as an abso-

lutely dismal condition.

Thus, ‘Ubayd denies hope rather emphatically (c. 14). From the abyss

of this existential gloom, general wisdom flowers suddenly in the form of

a monotonous, figuratively austere, despondent, pessimistic ontology,

wishing death, disbelieving in struggle, and suspicious of those strictures

of human togetherness known to the poet, namely, those provided in the

form of tribal allegiance (c. 14–26). Allah makes an appearance, openly

contrasting his resourcefulness to the unreliability of the human spirit.

The ontology here speaks of the randomness of fate, nullifying all notions

constructed around human effort: This is perhaps why this ontology is so

remarkably nonpedagogical—in sharp contrast to those of Zuhair andLabid, whose codes are directed at specific audiences to which they be-

longed and could be entrusted with lecturing. ‘Ubayd not only has no au-

dience, but his discourse even negates the determinacies of audience and

doubts the fruitfulness of pedagogic effort. There is no point in lecturing

when all are mortals, the lecturer, the lectured, and by extension, the lec-

ture itself. Nothing shall be preserved. The best one can do, from this

word until consumed by death, is to dealienate oneself. One must shed

the skin of outworn morality of attachments—particularly to a social en-tity as pointless as a tribe; distrust the normative closeness of kin (espe-

cially c. 24–25); forget alienation, borne out by the severance of links to




no witnesses behind—unlike in the case of prophetic constitution, when

a prophet is left behind as the witness and social medium of this exoge-

nous power. In this case, all that was left behind was a poetic discourse,

which was to become known as ‘Ubayd’s ode, rather than as the speech of

the gods. That elusive pre-Islamic Allah, who commanded little definition

or regard, could on occasions interject himself briefly in order to rectify or

solidify a poorly supported person or sentence, quickly dissipating there-

after, with only fragments of a record of such an interjection left behind.

‘Ubayd’s supreme austerity was not a unique and unrepeatable story,

however, but rather a memorable archetype still in circulation by Mu-

hammad’s time. The prevailing image of perishing as the norm of nature,

lurking just around the corner, contrasted sharply with the long-termcontractual postures occasioning the emergence of a relatively wealthy

trading community in Mecca. This wealth, as outlined before, could not

dispel the specter of vulnerability to fate, especially as there was neither

the ideology nor the instrumentality to account for it or to maintain it

into perpetuity. The Qur’an itself began this story by unambiguously reg-

istering this adjoining coexistence in both geography and consciousness

of fortune and deprivation.18

god’s contracts

Thus, in light of a system of faith motivated by an awareness that the

world presented acute dangers to the city’s livelihood, it was indeed an

ironic twist that it was ultimately possible to bring Mecca into Islam pre-

cisely by accentuating such conditions of terror upon the city by the

migrating Muslim community. Contrary to expectations implicit in theQur’anic observation just noted, it was not a Mecca fearful of its disorderly

environs that willingly followed Muhammad but, rather, that chaotic out-

side itself—more specifically, Medina, home to perennially warring semi-

sedentary communities—that exhibited the most voluntary willingness

to follow an instrumental (rather than simply spiritual) prophetic leader-

ship. The ramifications of this transition included the evolution of in-

creasingly instrumental and detailed regulations for the idea of social jus-

tice and social exchange, virtually all of which developed in Medina. Thisdevelopment proceeded in a piecemeal and experimental fashion and was

largely based on economies of exchange and production that the faithful




were familiar with. The gradual cosmology that was ostensibly the back-

ground of this legalistic formulation dictated that even economies that

Muslims were less familiar with by then—for example, agriculture19—

could still be divinely regulated by being seen, at the level of their es-

sences, as parts of a general human effort to sustain and reproduce life.20

In general, however, the idea of exchange itself was seen as the model of

the relationship between the faithful and Allah, a relationship whose na-

ture flowed specifically from the metaphors of commercial activities and

contractual obligations: “God has purchased from the faithful their lives

and worldly goods and in return has promised them the Garden. They

will fight for the cause of God, slay and be slain. Such is the true promise

which He has made them in the Torah, the Gospel and the Koran. Andwho is more true to his pledge than God? Rejoice then in the bargain you

have made.”21

On other occasions, details of such a (transhistorical) bargain were

clarified; the bargain itself was available only to those who did not allow

their economy to obscure their relation to Allah and, more innovatively,

their obligation toward other members of the umma.22 To give alms was

the central new point, and Allah’s command to do so was articulated in a

novel way that went beyond the simple promise of heavenly reward: Alms

were not being given to the poor but in effect to Allah himself, who had to

assume the role of an authoritative tax collector until an Islamic state that

could assume such a responsibility could come into existence.23 This lack

of instrumentality is further evidenced by the fact that the redistribution

of wealth within the community through alms was not introduced as a

“tax” at all but, rather, as a “loan” to God, who guaranteed repayment of

the principle along with a hefty interest: “Who will grant God a generousloan? He will repay him many times over. It is God who enriches and

makes poor. To Him you shall return. . . . Believers, bestow in alms a part

of what We have given you before a day arrives when commerce and

friendship and intercession shall be no more.”24

The practice of setting aside a sum of wealth for charitable purposes

had its roots in pre-Islamic practices and traditions.25 The old rifadah tax

in Mecca, which the city’s inhabitants paid in order to provide pilgrims

with sustenance, was inseparable from the city’s self-propagated image of open sanctity toward various tribal communities. But otherwise, the prac-

tice of giving condensed in the concept of sadaqah (charity) was largely




confined within a tribe. With the advent of the Muhajirun and the war

economy, as outlined before, new groups of legitimate recipients of the

spoils were added, groups that no longer coincided with the older social

structures of charity.26 The introduction of alms, in this context, was

clearly meant to enforce charity as a religious obligation rather than leav-

ing it to individual decision, as in the case of the sadaqah, or restricting it

to specific times and ends, as in the case of the rifadah. Alms (zakah) were

meant to transcend temporality and immediacy and act as a continuous

link of attention between the transtribal faithful.

The way alms were introduced testified to the incomplete consolida-

tion of and control over the umma. Allah solemnly decreed the manner in

which believers were to divide the spoils of war; in contrast, he pleadedwith them to give alms to Allah, promising them in every such instance

a generous repayment—which in its spirit went against the Qur’anic

frowning upon speculative wealth enhancement through usury. The rec-

ognition that alms created a debt owed by God to the faithful flowed from

the commercial mentality that had shaped the socioeconomic horizons of

Islam and that had already been experimented with in the symbiosis be-

tween commercial and charitable exchange introduced early on in Medina

in the “market of the prophet.”27

The issue of alms, generally revealed in the context of the war economy

and the distribution of its spoils, was of crucial importance with regards

to the idea of social justice within the community of the faithful, especially

in a community that was to be typified by cross-class and cross-tribal soli-

darity. Thus, the Qur’an became increasingly more assertive in furthering

the issue. That assertiveness gradually evolved out of both the increased

instrumental and legal authority of Islamic leadership and the continuedreluctance of many of the rich faithful to pay when the demand was

couched in terms of seemingly voluntary loaning. There are passages, for

instance, in which those who withhold alms are threatened with being re-

placed by others as recipients of divine bounty and mercy.28 Resistance to

this taxation is well noted in the Qur’an, up to and including mockery by

those who found the idea of giving Allah a “generous loan” to be quite hu-

morous:“God has heard the words of those who said: ‘God is poor, but we

are rich.’ Their words We will record, and their slaying of the prophets unjustly. We shall say: ‘Taste now the torment of flagration.’”29

Despite the extent of the insult to divinity, Allah does not, in that early




Medinian passage, decree eternal punishment exclusively on the basis of

the blasphemous statement. Instead, he assigns to them another imagi-

nary evil act (unjustly slaying their prophets). At that point, the refusal to

pay alms, though not being regarded as infidelity, was made punishable

by being seen in the context and with the appendage of the grave and

unanchored but transhistorically recurrent sin of murdering God’s mes-

sengers. In the late surah of at-Tauba, thought to be one of the last surahs

of the Qur’an, when the Islamic umma had become a more abstract and

widespread phenomenon, involving various societies and tribes and per-

meating the major cities and towns, withholding alms became by itself a

reason for eternal punishment, from which even the intercession of the

prophet himself could not save the sinner.30

These discursive events concerning the question of almsgiving involve

more than mere differences in time and space. The variety of discourses

regarding almsgiving indicate the immense importance of the issue. The

gradual emergence of the transclass and transtribal umma made a certain

form of wealth redistribution an irreplaceable mechanism for ensuring

the cohesive solidarity of diverse social strata, especially because Islam be-

came in an important sense a placeholder for this grand peace, among

other things. Thus, in the final version of early, textual Islam, almsgiving

grew to be one of the “five pillars” of the faith, especially as the claim that

Islam was intended as the religion of the “mother of towns” was relin-

quished in practice, when that town itself had to be overcome by a force

consisting of many more Ansar, nomads, and seminomads than authentic

Meccan Muhajirun, who had become a small minority of the umma by

then.

war and the code of justice

The notion of social justice is prevalent in some of the main themes of

pre-Islamic odes, being propounded mainly not by the outcast or heroic

poets but, rather, by those who had recognizable social standing. In such

cases, there are indications of growing social complexity, particularly when

dispensing justice ceases to refer, appeal, or adhere to rules of straight-

forward nomadic egalitarianism (for example, Labid, c. 79; 85–86). InLabid’s ode, the notion of “right” is abundantly general, and the main

concern seems to be the mechanism of pronouncing justice rather than




generosity of two resourceful chiefs, who gave out of their own wealth to

settle all remaining claims to diyyah.

After the long tribute to the tradition, Zuhair begins to record the

peace. The two arbitrators are praised for patching up a breach in nature,

when a state of concord within a purportedly single, albeit overarching,

tribal community was shattered. A war broke out that, despite its leg-

endary duration, continues to be recognized as an anomaly. Those who

bring it to an end are praised for restoring a natural order. They have not

developed new methods but, rather, have “restored,” revived, and made

workable again old and forgotten rules for the resolution of conflicts. The

end of a tribal war means more than that there would be no more blood-

shed: The freely wandering nomad would be restored to a natural order,defined by the freedom from the restriction upon movement and expan-

sive associations, restrictions borne out by the fact of war, of having to

take sides, of having to walk cautiously upon the land, of having to stand

by a too broadly defined kinfolk beyond the periodicity of economic

necessity. The order that is restored is that transcendental freedom from a

burdensome and demanding frame of belonging that the war situation

had so valorized. The order that is being restored is that under which the

social being is less definable by sociability than by being. The promise of this

fluid “order” is thus a return to conditions of unconfined wandering.

But in this case, when tribal wars gradually became unforgettable

legends—in a way that the Qur’an did not fail to take note of, as it showed

concern for the durability of the brittle peace of Mecca—the advent of

peace introduced new and memorable dimensions into the traditional

process of the restoration of justice. In Zuhair’s rendition of the story,

peace became possible because of the emergence of a new form of active leadership, replacing the passive arbitrator of times past. Because of the

irreplaceability of their function, the two chiefs in question became mod-

els for a possibly novel method of attaining justice. The description of the

restorationist effort entailed describing the restorers as well as the way

they had accomplished the celebrated effect.

In the ode, those models signify a single-handed accomplishment by

outsiders to the conflict. The memory of the war’s enormous bloodshed

and great length is wiped out by “ample giving and fair speaking” (c. 20).Though the abundance of the ample giving could be duly described (c.

22–25), “fair speaking,” a less calculable but no less essential precondition




for justice, induces a more complicated assessment. “Fair speaking”

(ma‘rufen mina l-qawl ) is opposed in this case to hidden, inarticulable

desire. Couplet 27 speaks of “whatever is in your breasts,” that is, of sur-

reptitious vindictives. According to at-Tibrizi, what was “hidden” was the

proud claim by Dhubyan that they were not necessarily thirsting for peace

and that they could go on with the war. The poet, however, is not any

more explicit about what he means (for example, couplet 27 could also

mean that he is suspicious of their agreement to peace). The nomadic

context of this transmutation between war and peace is that of a lack of

an instrumental central authority capable of guaranteeing either the con-

ditions of peace or the pronouncements to that effect. In this particular

case, an incident was to contribute to the great doubt about the efficacy of the whole discourse of peace: Husayn Ibn Damdam, a Dhubyanist

whose father was killed in the war, almost single-handedly destroyed the

entire peace project by turning his vindictiveness on an unsuspecting

‘Abside. The two arbitrators intervened again at this crucial juncture,

compensating for the crime with their own camels. Thus, though the lack

of a normalizing instrumentality was being deliberated, this incident

functioned as an empirical confirmation of such a lack.

Thus the vulnerability of “fair speaking” and of speaking of intentions

in general; whence comes God—who rarely occurs in the mu‘allaqat —as

a guarantor. He guarantees by virtue of his “knowledge” of the unspoken

intentions. The succeeding couplet (c. 28) is surprisingly “Islamic” in

character (“Day of Reckoning”), seemingly attempting to further instru-

mentalize this God who, in any case, is abruptly aborted thereafter.31 Allah

is here merely an experiment in a large parade of possibilities that Zuhair

sets to march in the quest after guarantees of peace and pronounced in-tentions. Thus, it is interesting that in the very next couplet, he announces

his intention to tell the audience of another mighty externality, which

(unlike Allah?) “ma huwa bil-hadithi l-murajjami [is not a tale told at ran-

dom, a vague conjecture]”: It is to be the concrete evidence of the horror

of war itself.

The only external guarantee of peace turns out to be a continual atten-

dance to the imagery of warfare. The phenomenon of war thus brings

forth an intricate set of morals lodged in specifically preserved memoriesof carnage, thereby producing knowledge that could be expected to guar-

antee peace by itself. The ultimate guarantee, thus, is founded upon a per-




manent knowledge of an extensive experience with a phenomenon that is

about to pass away. Such a project leads to some of the most eloquently

composed lines in the ode (c. 29–33). Images of war stumble over each

other (a flame, a grindstone, a mother pregnant with ill-omens, a field

yielding a poisoned harvest). War is expected to be a producer. But such

an expectation, which had traditionally accompanied the ghazw practice,

is shown in light of the legendary pre-Islamic wars to be increasingly

unable to function as such. Thus the metaphors of war in Zuhair’s ode

render a particular and vivid kind of knowledge. As the field disclaims the

harvest, all producers in nature are summoned to pronounce their dis-

dain for their productions.

Thus, in its quest after the guarantor of peace, the poetic discourse hereonly finds itself. By Zuhair’s time, the poet had already become a signifi-

cant locus of authority (many believed that poets produced their speech

with the aid of the jinn). Unlike an outcast like ‘Ubayd, the socially an-

chored poet here directs his speech to specific, namable, or describable

audiences (for example, c. 26 and 34). Here, poetics serve to define the au-

dience that is to hear the message. In other words, what is being defined is

the type of audience deemed appropriate for the task of interpreting the

lines. In some sense, this formula possesses a structure of delimitation

similar to the primary act of standing at the ruins: One “begins” by carv-

ing out from the vast expanse a certain space (a certain geography in

the case of the ruins, a certain social space here), defining it by features,

names, references, boundaries, history. One begins by setting the limits of

the receiver, which in this case is a diseased, torn society. In contrast to

Tarafa’s helplessly defensive discourse—which critiques the customary

societal obligations that ultimately led to his ostracism—one hears inZuhair’s a credible voice of authority, stemming from a socially con-

cerned, socially relevant poet, from within the walls of a supposed tradi-

tion of harmony and justice. This is an affirmative speech by a speaker

confident of a listening crowd. Unlike the earlier poets—that primordial

Imru’ l-Qays, who, because there was no one to listen to him, went to the

ruins and delivered to them his story—this one is capable not only of

speaking from within but of remodeling the fabric of his social abode

from within as well. By delivering a discourse that commences by definingthe audience, this authorial voice can reasonably hope to make such a

transitory audience into a continually present society.




The general characteristics of Zuhair’s audience/society are remarkably

simple. They are mighty, proud, secure, and naturally mobile; they do little

else: They pasture their flock, quench their thirst, renew their energies,

and go on (c. 36). As an outcome of their movement, they become in-

volved in a feud. They have no explicit intention to go to war, neither is

there any indication that they had a foreknowledge of the outcome of

their habitual migrations, and thus they could not be blamed. It is not

clear, nor apparently is it all that important to ascertain, whether they pre-

vail or simply survive stalemates and continue wandering beyond them:

They pastured their flock awhile, thirsting, then brought them down

to pools gushing with weapons and gouts of blood;

there they fulfilled dire doom together; then they led back

their beasts to a pasture noisome and unstomachable. (c. 36–37)

Who is their enemy? An unimportant detail.32 They clash with some other

force, some obstacle along the road, some hindrance in nature, but they

survive with a strength sufficient to carry them to another troublesome

destiny; of this one, again, they may have no foreknowledge. Yet they

have no need to worry, for they had already been introduced as being

indestructible, undefeatable, safe from all danger, and, above all, they are

always marching along or residing together (hillon halal ). Such is Zuhair’s

audience. It is the body so constituted that is now to be advised on how to

refrain from involvement in future wars.

As transtribal peace is reconstituted, war must be made to lose its

heroic appeal, its moralism of duty, its claim to normative necessity, its

positivity. The whole sequence finds its conclusion in couplets 44 to 46,

where the ultimate outcome of the vicious cycle of war is seen to consistof an overstatement of purpose, thus of unfulfillable and unacceptably

high claims by the warring factions. These three couplets, congested with

specific references, are clearly meant for the ears of a specific historic au-

dience. The names here are of tribal members who were killed long before

the war but who were later added by each tribe to the list of those whose

deaths the war was to avenge—and, by extension, the peace agreement

was to honor by adequate compensation. Their inclusion illustrates the

war’s ultimate illogic. The modes of thinking produced by this war, there-fore, include an inadmissible extension into spheres incongruous with it.

The discourse of peace begins by disarming war of all that is not a part of




its clearly discernible history. And with this proclamation (c. 46), images

of war dissipate, giving way to an extended but relatively simple code of

wisdom and ethics.

As opposed to customary nomadic raids, war thus required the intro-

duction of novel, or the reinvocation of “forgotten,” values to extinguish

its fire. In this regard, the ideological background of the war of the Muslims

with Mecca led to profoundly nontraditional attitudes with regards to its

settlement, elements of which appeared in the Peace of Hudaybiyyah. In

that case, the agreement was not based on a traditional code of ethics but,

rather, was couched in procedural/contractual language that specified the

obligations of the signatories without reference to universal moral back-

ground, as was imperative in Zuhair’s code.33 For the Muslims, the warwas an element of a new economy of acquisition sanctioned by God and

not by the antecedent nomadic tradition of ghazw. The novelty of the

legitimating background of acquisition in itself called for novel methods

of rationalizing its distribution, lest the umma fall pray to the whims of an

emergent warrior caste. According to sira accounts (traditional biogra-

phies of the prophet), the earliest revelations concerning the division of

the spoils of war were prompted by sharp disagreements among the victo-rious warriors in Badr regarding the matter, whereafter the Qur’an swiftly

assigned the responsibility for the spoils to the prophet, who divided it up

equally among the participants in the battle.34 Upon arrival in the city, a

more elaborate distribution scheme was introduced, taking a fifth of the

spoils from the warriors and giving it to “God.” God in this case represented

both a general idea of social good as well as specific social categories, such

as the family of the prophet, orphans, paupers, and wayfarers.35

fate and the legitimacy of acquisition

This “taxation” of the proceeds of war preceded the institution of alms-

giving and was clearly intended to enhance social welfare within the

umma. What is of interest here are the specific categories of recipients (be-

yond God and his messenger’s family), which coincided with the forms of

dispossession experienced among the believers. Orphans and paupers,whose very existence was evidence of injustice in the world, had already

been addressed with compassion in the early Meccan Qur’an,36 and the




flows effortlessly, for it requires no logical chains and justifications for

transitions across topics. And as such, each of its portions can be taken by

itself and re-presented by any common person as a common wisdom. To

a certain extent, Zuhair’s perspicacity shares with at least some Qur’anic

codes an archetypal form of law pronouncement, in which each sentence

possesses a proverbial generality, a rhythmic harmony, and the possibility

of easy confluence with popular wisdom. The simplicity and immediacy

of Zuhair’s code of manners readily delivers it not only as the outcome of

a rich life experience but, even more so, as a series of dictums to be used

in any selection deemed appropriate by the protagonist, but always with

respect to the empowering form of the legal statement. The poetic form

here repackages and reorganizes the discourse of everyday life in such away as to be able to simultaneously stand above it.40

We know that Zuhair is producing this general wisdom after a long

war. More precisely, he is speaking at its final moments, when peace is yet

to be restored as the norm, when bloodletting is still fresh in people’s

memories, when the air is still poisoned by animosities that only time

could heal. So Zuhair becomes, like the messenger of God, a witness

(c. 57: “I have seen the Fates”). He first takes note of general human con-

ditions and proclivities, where normal human action regularly leads to

warfare, which could in turn be untangled by the reinvocation of tra-

ditional authorities and forms of resolution. But witnessing the creeping

weakness of such methods, Zuhair begins a search for a guaranteeing

instrumentality. This he finds in his own metaphors, which reassemble

a memorable portrayal of the evil of war, tracing its course all the way to

its final degeneration into a profound anomaly of illogic and irrationality.

Pessimism and uncertainty abound in the cleavages of this world out-look. Such moments, however, are as essential for the reception of this

code as are continuous Qur’anic reminders of the negligibility of human

impact in the face of Allah’s power. By being reminded of its natural defi-

ciencies, the audience realizes its need for further guidance. Zuhair’s code

thus begins (c. 49) by belittling the individual in the face of fate: Mortality

is certain. After being reconfirmed, this old discovery is reintegrated into

and properly placed within this experiment of general ethics. The indi-

vidual being advised from this angle is one who is continually threatenednot by an abstract world but by social life itself. One must structure one’s

behavior so as to avoid being excluded, reviled, abused, disrespected, dis-




possessed, trampled upon, or thoroughly obliterated. There is nothing of

concrete value to add to this certainly perishable life, only things to avoid.

Human action is therefore always motivated by a fear of loss, not a desire

for improvement. Such a threat, in turn, could be circumvented by adher-

ing to the provided code. Thence, a purposeful, instrumental morality is

introduced that, for the time being, could regulate behavioral responses

within an existential void of positive purpose, a void waiting to be reap-

portioned and refilled at a later stage by Muhammad’s abstract God.

Zuhair’s Allah, as we have seen, was quickly purged from the ode, after

only a short appearance in two belated couplets (of debatable origin).

Instead of an abstract God capable of intervention in this world, the

source of instrumental action was located in what seemed to be a moresolid foundation: The individual could be guaranteed to respect the code

of manners out of an innate interest in avoiding dying from forces as de-

structive, but more manageable, than time. What the code promised,

therefore, was for the individual to languish until claimed by the ir-

reversible progression of the dahr (time as a total, self-enclosed natural

phenomenon). Thus, that vision of human capabilities, potentials, and

modes of fulfillment edified a loosely nomadic but essentially nonadditive

posture. That posture seemed to suffice for a world weary of war and ag-

grandized claims and yearning for the restoration of the habitual cycle of

periodic human destruction by fate alone. And as such, it sufficed until

the predicament of migration, dispossession, and sedentary wars restruc-

tured and instrumentalized a different kind of code, which was distin-

guished by the positivity it assigned to the category of labor, over and

above the passive wait for reclamation by fate.




Successive events, understood in terms of continually changing micro-

contexts, may show the grand historical narrative that they collectively

construct to be simply the product of a series of accidents, whose ultimate

outcome could not have been predicted from the outset. This does not

necessarily entail the complete absence of “structure”; rather, it highlightsthe ex post facto organization of a grand narrative into meaning. This

posterior meaning would then, once apprehended according to a com-

mon enough conceptual formula, make the grand phenomenon appear

natural and even necessary. Thus, though everything is perfectly accounted

for in the epigraph to this chapter, what remains as an unexplored mys-

tery is the question of whose “need” it was that the emergence of a state

fulfilled. It could be that an “Arab state,” rather than being the “great need

of the times,” was in effect the unintended result of many developmentsbased on pronouncements of less-profound needs. The emergence of a

state out of this story can be understood in terms of structural imperatives

257

nine

In Lieu of a Conclusion:

The Origins, the System, and the Accident

An Arab state, framed according to Arab ideals, tailored to the new condi-

tions and yet sufficiently close to the Bedouin life that it had to incorpo-

rate, and able to take its place on an equal footing with the great em-

pires—this was the great need of the times. The way was open for the man

of genius who could respond to it better than any other. That man was about to be born.

—Rodinson, 37



coalescing out of unpredictable and unforeseen actions and counteractions

rather than in terms of preexistent needs.1

The debate on whether a state was at the intentional roots of Islam is

quite old.2 The point here is not that the question of state is itself intrinsi-

cally interesting but, rather, that the concept of state offers one organizing

device by which the sum total of countless affairs and accidents can be

gathered in an ordered fashion. For example, Marxist authors like Husayn

Muruwah, Sulayman Bashir, and E.A. Belyaev introduce, rather too confi-

dently, the claim concerning a link between the coming into being of a

centralized authority and the displacement of polytheism by monotheism.

But even if one detects in the shift toward monotheism a desire for cosmi-

cally referenced social totality, one cannot be certain that that desire alonewould furnish the basis for and be necessarily meditated in terms of a

central state.

Other organizing devices are used by other practitioners in the field.

For instance, Ibrahim argues that Islam caused a social reorganization

that was ultimately advantageous to the merchants.3 Though this may be

true, the story of Islam cannot be reduced to a straightforward tale of

class conflict, although to a certain extent that was a factor; nor can it be

assumed that such an outcome was planned or intended from the point of

view of the “origins.” Overall, one sees a widespread effort to deduce a

general and socially or ideologically structured meaning of this historical

tale, an effort seen obviously in traditionalist schools of thought but also

seen in the heritage of orientalism and in the anthrosociologism of William

Watt and Ernest Gellner.4 Throughout such works, the interest is in the

religion’s “persistent major themes,” in its stillness, homogeneity, and con-

tinuity. To do otherwise would open one to the charge of seeming to sug-gest that all that has been recorded was a set of scattered responses to con-

tingencies carried across unpredictable contours, or are fragments of no

solid genealogical base. If such is the claim, then how, if at all, can one ac-

count for the apparent coherence of the text, or for its apparent ability to

systematize the reflections and reference points of those who believe in it?

The urge to systematize is ubiquitous in historical research. A Marxist

like Belyaev, for instance, shares many of the tropes of the grand categori-

cal thinking one would usually associate with orientalism, finding littleproblem in employing descriptive terms such as “underdeveloped reli-

gion” and “distorted mixture.”5 But for the believers, and this is the heart

258 • In Lieu of a Conclusion



of the matter for the historical sociology of consciousness, the body

of knowledge in which they believed was logically integrated and devel-

oped in comparison to what preceded it (that is, the earlier system of

knowledge that it had to dislodge) and to what existed synchronically

outside it. An exotic term like “distorted mixture,” apparently employed

to imply an unacceptable level of logical heterogeneity, is grounded on

the thesis that some pre-Islamic and “Judaeo-Christian” themes had sur-

vived throughout the Qur’an. What is not deemed significant is the early

believers’ own awareness of such a “foreign” penetration, let alone their

own way of signifying it.

In sociological terms, a system is to be found outside of the text proper,

since a text is supposed to express a system existing in some sociohistoricalcondition. For instance, the Islamic state was a system not simply because

it was “objectively” a system but because its meaning and self-definition

were referenced to the text. It cited the Qur’an and Hadith (sayings attrib-

uted to Muhammad) in any way it found fit for the purpose of adminis-

tering territories, distributing wealth, legitimating various ways of gover-

nance, and judging on, or laying aside, newly encountered areas of legality.

Though ironic, the eventual ascension over the Islamic state machinery by

the Umayyads, once Muhammad’s most resolute opponents in Mecca,

was possible precisely because the Umayyads also could become an inte-

gral part of the new system.6

The text, however, came into being not in order to systematize the

superstructure of the Islamic state but to systematize a less-institutional

arrangement of the social life to which the prophet was told he was a

“witness” (shahed ). Thus, in contrast to its elaborate rules on the prob-

lems it recognized as such in its immediate historical surroundings, theQur’an never spelled out any direct proposals on how a state was to be

governed, and so these rules had to be extrapolated from various prophet-

ic and Qur’anic judgments. This lack is evident in the succession of the

first four caliphs: After each one passed away, a different method was

used for selecting a successor. (Each of those methods, however, empha-

sized the assent [bay‘ah] of the community of believers.) It was only after

the fourth caliph, ‘Ali, during whose reign it was becoming obvious that

the Muslim umma, demographically magnified, territorially expansive,and ideologically factionalized, was not likely to assent in its entirety to any

single subsequent ruler that a forcible takeover of the state machinery

In Lieu of a Conclusion • 259



marked the beginning of incorporation of Meccan nobility into promi-

nence within Islamic political structures in a way that antagonized those

who had been their main opponents up to that point, namely, the disen-

franchised Muhajirun. He sees the election of ‘Uthman, who was both a

noble Meccan and one of the Muhajirun, as a sign of compromise be-

tween the two social forces.10

Thus it would seem that believers who joined on strictly ideological

grounds were continually supplemented by those who were persuaded on

the basis of their own social values or because of calculations having to do

with their position within the social hierarchy. Aside from eventually con-

firming the status of the nobility, Muhammad also found himself, as we

saw previously, using a strictly city-centered appeal in Mecca at large or,when venturing to Islamicize the nomads, arguing in terms of tribal dis-

course of alliance, genealogy, and obligation. The peaceful Islamicization

of Asad, for example, is explained in the sources in terms of a clear tribal

paradigm, which emphasized the tribe’s genealogical affinity with the

prophet and which wedded allegiance to faith to a practical deal, allowing

the tribe to water its herd outside of its territories in years of draught and

to assume local control over the dispensation of the sadaqah (charity).11

Such embeddedness in and appeal to various forms of social values

and ideas, while progressively expanding the range of social groups

deemed fit for Islamicization and to which Islam proved to be a fruitful

ideological investment, also opened the door for political opportunism

from within the house of the umma. The ridda (renegade) wars immedi-

ately following Muhammad’s death indicate that even when it seemed

socially integrative and all-encompassing, Islam, much like pre-Islamic,

vaguely Meccan-centered Arabian spiritual orders, was far from com-manding a universally deep following. Rather, it was often understood,

particularly among the nomads, as a revocable oath of allegiance possess-

ing a status comparable to a loose, voluntary transtribal alliance. The

Islamic use of tribal bonds and language itself testifies to its experimental

nature, all the way down to the aftermath of the unification of Arabia. It

was only the Islamic conquests ( futuhat ) outside of the peninsula that

resolved the structural impediments to the full consolidation of Islam—

whence the religion’s life as an irrevocable, standard, and complete textbegan in earnest.

The remarkable survival of references to and associations with momen-




tary or parochial logics into transhistorical tropes suggests that texts,

rather than simply referencing sociological systems, actually create systems

of their own, to which subsequent events are referenced in ways that can-

not be predicted. For instance, the unusual consistency throughout the

Qur’an on the question of God’s transcendental monotheism can be seen

as a direct result of its moment of introduction, when it had to legitimate

itself against an ontotheological landscape dominated by a multiplicity of

“harmless and helpless” idols. The attributes of Allah then were deter-

mined not merely on the basis of their social function but also on the

basis of the multitude of functions that the then-prevailing, yet weak, onto-

theology was seen as failing to fulfill.12 Many centuries later, when pa-

ganism was no longer a threat, it did not go unnoticed that the recordedattributes of Allah—since the text speaking of them was irreplaceable—

needed to be accounted for by extraneous efforts, namely, by reoriented

and elaborate philosophical reformulations.13

A similar logic can be applied to the legal system. As we have seen, the

evolving text was not proposing an abstract constitutional framework

against which subsequent concrete and multifaceted scenarios could be

judged; rather, it was commenting on real, experienced, isolated cases as

they were encountered. That is why the highly elaborate Islamic juris-

prudence, with its four major schools, had to await the coming into being

of a vast empire, uniting various ethnicities for the first time, and requir-

ing, as one element of its standardized centralism, a more coherent set of

judicial standards. Each of the four major schools followed the changing

realities, and though they amplified new methods of exegesis and re-

framed the boundaries of legitimate human reason and inference, they

continued to accept the final referential status of the original text, to whichfurther traditions of commentary were appended.

The context of the text’s moment of introduction also determined its

urban-commercial-contractual air. We have seen that agrarian life was

barely mentioned and that Bedouin life was looked on less often as a

sphere of existence demanding ontological justification and regulatory

divine rules than as a foreign or only tenuously loyal form of living and

behavior. We have seen, for instance, how the nomads were not regarded

as true believers until they migrated to Dar al-Muhajirun (Medina), wherethey could be put under control. Otherwise, they were merely looked

upon as, at best, temporary allies, even when they professed a belief in




Islam. To see how this state of affairs, born of practical strategic concerns

in Arabia, then became the basis for one model for the political organiza-

tion of the faithful, one only needs to examine another example, when the

Muslims became a minority in Spain many centuries later in a completely

different context. In Spain, they were frequently called upon to migrate

to Grenada, where Muslims retained control, precisely on the basis of

Muhammad’s model of hijra (migration) and his seemingly comparable

appeal to the faithful who lived away from the domain of territorial con-

trol of an Islamic political organization.14

What order of coherence, then, does the stage of origins speak of? Even

if the foundational text of Islam was grounded in the failure of pre-Islamic

culture, its visionary, futuristic outlook was not disconnected from thatculture either. The cosmological vision of Allah was a direct judgment on

the failure of the idols in what shortly after the time of Muhammad

would seem like a modest task: to safeguard Mecca’s precarious role in the

world, a world in which it reverted back to an insignificant politico-

economic (though not spiritual) footnote precisely after the triumph of

Islam.

The other metaphysical grounds for Islam consisted in the scattering of

spiritual ideas and meditative practices floating upon the land, which co-

existed largely at peace with paganism, commonly known as Hanifism.

This background is freely acknowledged in the Qur’an and throughout

the tradition. As it coalesced, the new faith not only incorporated the con-

tent of such ideas, but it also nurtured the aura of their metaphysics,

moral concerns, meditative air, and critical wisdom. But the significant

point was that it was Islam, a code name for a full-fledged system, rather

than Hanifism, that came to be referenced as the complete body of knowl-edge. The process of that becoming involved more than pure persua-

sion. Unlike Hanifism, Islam also became implicated in ushering in novel

methods of social organization that transcended tribal solidarity and thus

resulted in the formation of a new level of community life, which could

not have been predicted at the outset of Muhammad’s prophetic career

in Mecca.

In this sense, the differences between Islam and Hanifism can be seen

in formal rather than substantive terms. In the first place, if Hanifism en-tailed an anticipation of a prophet, then Islam entailed an empirical rep-

resentation of such an expectation. That is, Islam became possible when




were to be had) were all he would be expected to draw on in order to le-

gitimate his prophethood.

Such a crisis became the basis for the third formal difference between

Islam and Hanifism, namely, the aforementioned communicative pre-

dicament that was so detrimental to Muhammad in Mecca. The failure to

legitimize prophethood was, as indicated above, part of a formal logic im-

plicit precisely in the strong Islamic idea of Allah. On the other hand, the

need to announce the prophethood was premised on a formal and radical

interpretation of a floating idea of anticipation. The possibility of such an

interpretation, in turn, was premised on an ethical actualization of the

idea of anticipation. That is, if the existence of an anticipation of prophet-

hood indicates a social crisis, then the need to actualize such an anticipa-tion is at least in part predicated on the conviction that the resolution of

the crisis is for the good of society. The rejection of such an announce-

ment, which in Muhammad’s case was based on a lack of distinctive legiti-

macy, which the aloof Allah could not furnish, was nonetheless under-

stood by Muhammad’s few followers to mean only that the community

could not know its own good. Such an interpreted lack of capacity to

determine what was good for oneself seemed, therefore, to defy the logic

of nature, so much so that war against Mecca, for which Allah had shown

so much concern and love, became inevitable. Defiance of a radical for-

mal logic could only invite war, which had the paradoxical objectives of

taking revenge on and saving what one loved at the same time.

But as we have seen, Meccan society totally rejected neither Muhammad

himself nor his ideology. More than anything else, the city’s power struc-

ture challenged Muhammad’s tribal credentials as bases of prophethood,

in spite of the fact that he usually refrained from basing his prophethoodon such credentials. Mecca’s ontotheological crisis, as I have argued, was

intensified precisely because its society had no social mechanism through

which the crisis could be articulated, confronted, and resolved through a

method that the entire community assented to. Thus, it was only a matter

of time before the band of believers would break away from a society that

was incapable of appreciating their constructive role and real concern for

the fate of their brethren. We have also seen how the Muhajirun later

adopted a vengeful attitude toward Mecca precisely because, in “rejecting”them, it showed itself to be going against its own natural product. It is

in this context that one can understand why, for instance, the believers




changed the direction of their prayer (qibla ) toward Mecca at the very

moment they were about to commence a bitter war against the city.

The rejection was thus due not so much to Muhammad’s performance

as to the communicative limits set by the prevailing social organization

and its rules. The relevant question is, therefore, nothing like “What if the

prophet had not been born, or had been born somewhere else, or at some

other point in time, or had a different personality, or died prematurely, or

abandoned the project altogether?” The question is: “Through what social

dynamics was the idea of anticipation to present its bill to the world?”

Needless to say, the prophet, as an empirical person, was but one compo-

nent of the total pattern in which Meccan society received a transfor-

mative pedagogy. We have seen, for instance, how a different method of transformation in a roughly comparable society played itself out in the

case of the Ansar, later to be Muhammad’s most crucial followers, most of

whom believed in Islam before ever having seen the prophet. Their need

to believe had not been contaminated, as in Mecca, with an irreversible

experience of the prophet’s ordinariness. Thus, by the time Muhammad

migrated to their dwellings, he had already passed what may be called “the

threshold of legitimation.”

In this sense, passing a threshold of legitimation entails the establish-

ment of a trajectory for the emergence of a recognizable “system” out of

an unpredictable, chaotic sequence of events. To pass a threshold of legiti-

mation means more than acquiring the ability to persuade by pure argu-

ment. It means that the process of attaining such a legitimation itself

must be both extratextual and appearing to deserve social respect. The

authenticity of the text here is established against a background and

through a process that legitimize the field of concerns evident in the texteven as they ignore such concerns. Note, for instance, the Medinian

Qur’an’s radical shift of emphasis away from Mecca once the Muslim

community was relocated away from the city. That is, once the need to

acquire universal legitimation becomes more pressing, the text avoids

restricting the dialogic experience to a single “addressee.” Rather, it also

resorts to an extraneous logic that, in seeming to be universal, can also

claim to transcend the communicative restrictions engendered by the

presence of an addressee, so that such an addressee is made aware that itdoes not monopolize the rules governing the scene of the dialogic experi-

ence underway.




But in abstracting and universalizing the addressee of the divine mes-

sage in this fashion, the entire world moves inside the gradually opened up

pages of the grand text. Unlike the text proper, however, the social trans-

actions taking shape on its periphery never spelled out a transhistorical

last word. But the recording activity of the religious text, which witnessed

and directly commented on such transactions, rendered the heterogeneity

of the extratextual sphere noiseless. The potentially explosive nature of

the relations between the various social segments and worldviews claim-

ing unity in the text moved inside the new ideological house, where they

furnished the ground for continued social conflict and dynamism within

the umma.15

This heterogeneity is prefigured in pagan pluralism, which itself illus-trates the lack of a unifying referential basis, in whose absence the notion

of unanimity was highlighted as a basis of collective decisions. Paradoxi-

cally, such an insistence on unanimity seems to have resulted from the

breakdown of earlier conditions of nomadic egalitarianism in sedentary

communities such as Mecca, where the drive toward consensus is report-

ed to have typified the deliberations of the gathering (al-mala’ ) in Dar

an-Nadwah. By contrast, in the less-differentiated nomadic setting, the

loyalty of the individual to the tribe was underlined by an experience of

normative belonging to a social unit where likelihoods of fortune and

misfortune were more equitably distributed. The insistence on unanimity

in the sedentary setting not only expressed the emergence of unenforce-

able conditions of differentiation but was also a prelude to the struggle for

certainty, which in that case was eventually found in surrendering the

human will to an active but unaccountable God. Unanimity, under condi-

tions of awareness of the lack of perfection of the community as a systemof unalienated reciprocities, could provide authorization for action but

could not surround the authorized act with ethical or normative certainty.

With such a lack, it became possible to experiment with different forms of

authority, such as prophetic authority. The prophet cancels the need for

unanimity, since the source of certainty is then relocated outside of soci-

ety and given back to its creator.

Thus, under practical circumstances and through a convoluted process,

Islam was woven out of the interaction of such concerns, conditions,limits, and expressive and communicative venues. Ancient consciousness

could hardly posit a question anticipating unilinear systematicity, such as




“Whose ideology fashioned the Islamic religion?”16 The final form and

content of the religious text were not shaped through solitary meditations

of a prophet; they were shaped with respect to the conditions and criteria

that the societies he faced deemed worthy of divine or prophetic judg-

ments and with respect to contours of expression prefigured by grand

genres such as the encyclopedic ode. Having to contend with the most

miserable of Meccans as original followers; having failed, despite a special

effort, with the prosperous Meccans; having lost his tribal belonging and

having migrated; having had to contend with the transitory society of

Medina and with the unreliable Bedouin allies; having had to act as a situa-

tional statesman more often than as a detached and universal prophet;

having had to wage war; having had to accept the allegiance of social sec-tors he never thought of at the beginning of his prophethood—all such

happenings were independent of the subjective choice of the prophet. His

most important legacy, the reason for his unparalleled immortalization,

lies in the fact that by the time his prophetic credentials were beginning to

be established, many unintegrated and often antagonistic social units,

classes, and detached individuals were already attracted to his message.

Each responded to it through the dynamics of its own life, each claimed

him, along with the rest of the holy text, in their own way, but all were

equally incapable of comprehending their unintended and unprecedent-

ed unification in terms that would preclude overloading the text with the

meaning of their circumstantial relationship to it. We have seen an impor-

tant manifestation of such an incomprehension already appearing before

the death of the prophet, namely, in the sharp dichotomy between the

‘Umarist and ‘Uthmanist paradigms toward the Peace of Hudaybiyyah.

Thus the Book, like the prophet, is a witness and an instigator of thisgrand flux. A witness because the raw materials for it were long in supply

and an instigator because it endowed the raw material with textual clothes

that allowed it to speak and eventually wreak havoc upon the established

order. As it took textual form, the religion was confounded with such a

diversity and found itself chasing a continually evolving reality with con-

tinually evolving modes of witnessing, commentary, and acknowledg-

ment. Thus, at its point of origin, it had no consciousness of itself that

could be defined in any terms that could be restricted to a particular andunchanging way of categorizing social reality. Its terms of speaking were

guided by the perception that an antecedent condition of social harmony




had collapsed together with its ontological set of references, leaving soci-

ety with the task of experimenting with a reconstruction. The reconstruc-

tion, which invoked the discourse of harmony, found itself amplifying

such a theme as a grander-than-foreseen system came to house diverse

groups. Those groups could not have been intended or even detected as

legitimate addressees from the original point of view. But it was such an

accomplishment that molded the foundational text of the origins as a

transhistorical point of reference for a variety of systems. For being such a

plenum, for such a lack of essentiality, Islam remains with us today, like all

other incidental yet formative and imposing plenums of which the world

is made.




introduction

1. For an outline of this argument, see Gates, 11–22; Said (1983), 89–107.

2. See Crone’s Meccan Trade and Sulayman Bashir’s Muqqadimah fi al-Tarikh

al-Akher (1984). For a critical assessment of the documents that the revisionist histo-

rians rely on, see Ibrahim (1987).

3. Crone, 203–230.

4. Such an attitude is perhaps best exemplified in the following passage by

Maxime Rodinson, a rather sympathetic reader of the tradition: “Those who forged

the traditions certainly had a true literary gift; they gave their fictions that vivid, easy,

familiar quality that makes them so delightful to read—those animated dialogues,those details that seem as though they must have been experienced, those turns of

phrase in reported speech, those moments of humour, all seem more redolent of liter-

ary talent than of historical authenticity” (xi). One could counter this argument by

noting that receptiveness to the Islamic message was enhanced to the extent that the

media of its transmission could transcend daily life normalcy, at both levels of dis-

course and manners of behavior. Though historical facts matter, as far as the study of a

worldview is concerned so do what protagonists in the story wanted to believe as facts,

which are subsequently surrounded with significations, animated structures, poetics,

and mythologies.

5. For example, Crone’s account of the story of Ibn Ubay’s opposition to Muham-

mad in Medina, which is examined in Chapter 7 of this book, does not reveal a

271

Notes



contradiction in the sources as she claims. Rather, the seeming contradictions in the

story of Ibn Ubay can be seen to highlight the experimental nature of the political em-

ployment of religion, as Islam oscillated between practical verdicts implicated in the

immediacy of everyday life, on the one hand, and the notion of abstract and general

authority already prefigured in the phenomenon of an absentee prophet, as Muham-mad was for Medina before his migration, on the other. If anything, the story of Ibn

Ubay indeed registers a significant social transformation in the role of a new faith,as it

became increasingly implicated in the question of regulatory, instrumental authority.

This type of authority was foreign to the meditative orientation of Muhammad and

the earliest faithful.

6. Lukàcs, 30–34.

1. the ideology of the horizons

1. The Arabs themselves associated the term “Arabia Felix” only with Yemen, un-

like the Greeks and Romans, who associated it with the entire Arabian Peninsula.

2. Al-Istakhri, 24.

3. Qur’an 14:37.

4. Imru’ l-Qays (circa a.d. 500–540), of the tribe of Kinda. He was a son of the last

king of Kinda—a short-lived order of sovereignty in Najd in the north central Arabian

Peninsula that acted to arbitrate between and pacify warring nomadic tribes. Imru’

l-Qays, so the legend goes, was thrown out by his father for his indulgence in poetry.

The legend presents him as an irreverent, sensual, highly versatile lover. He wasnonetheless to be entrusted with reclaiming his family’s withering kingship. Being de-

serted by all his former allies, including his own brothers, he resorted in vain to asking

the help of Justinian, the emperor of Byzantium. He died on the way back from

Constantinople. An illuminating biography is available in Tuetey, Imrulkais of Kinda.

A. J. Arberry, in The Seven Odes, handsomely elucidates the life stories of Imru’ l-Qays

and six other major pre-Islamic poets.

5. Al-Alusi, vol. 1, 188, 194.

6. Al-Hamawi, vol. 2, 203.

7. See ‘Aqel, 28–29.

8. Al-Hamawi, vol. 4, 1026–1034.

9. Al-Istakhri, 26.

10. Al-Mas‘udi, vol. 2, 64.

11. Some authorities argue that the eastern region of Bahrain (not to be confused

with the modern-day island of Bahrain) was the most densely inhabited region in the

peninsula. See ‘Ali, vol. 1, 192. The number of suqs held there seems both to partially

support this and to account for its intermediary role in global trade, especially after

the interruption of the land route passing through Persia in the sixth century a.d.

12. Al-Alusi, vol. 1, 264–270; al-Hamadani, 296. Other sources, such as Marzuqi,

Ibn Habib, and Ya‘qubi, offer slightly differing accounts. For a general assessement of

this literature, see Simon, 78–91. The varying accounts also leave the impression that

272 • Notes to Chapter 1



not all traders moved with the cycle, with a number staying behind in Hadramaut and

another contingent continuing northward to Khaibar after ‘Ukaz.

13. Al-Istakhri, 27–28; al-Alusi, vol. 1, 185–186.

14. For a discussion of this theme, see ‘Ali, vol. 1, 198.

15. On average, a camel can carry 600–700 pounds, which can be increased to1,000 pounds if speed is not required or reduced to 300 pounds if fast delivery is the

main concern. See Blome, 4.

16. The beast acting as a symbol on behalf of the camel here is reminiscent of

Labid’s ode. The beast is lonesome, cold, threatened by the hunters, and forced to fight

their hounds for survival. Unlike in Labid’s construction, however, there are no in-

dications that the beast survived in the ode of an-Nabigha, whose audience was gener-

ally more sedentary and sovereign.

2. socioeconomy and the horizon of thought

1. Ibn Khaldun, 211. For a more comprehensive survey of theories pertaining to

the comparative origins of nomadism, see Khazanov, 85–118. Although it could be ar-

gued that the protection of wealth does not in and of itself require a sedentary frame-

work of existence—since a network of mutual defense obligations within the nomadic

tribe itself could be mobilized for that purpose—the investment and regular accumu-

lation of such wealth is rooted in sedentary prerequisites. The sedentarizing impera-

tives of the various facets of wealth depend on whether the mutual defense obliga-

tions, comprising subtribal units, could supersede the threat posed by individual wealth to the principle of austere egalitarianism. In this case, the individual concep-

tion of wealth will seem to invite a move outside of nomadism into a protective frame-

work of sedentarism.

2. Al-Mas‘udi, vol. 2, 94. His observations indirectly suggest that nomads were

continually seeking to settle, though most such attempts failed.

3. Some reports indicate that Meccans began organizing their own caravans to

Yemen and Syria during the days of the Qurayshan chief Hashem Ibn ‘Abd Manaf,

probably during the first half of the sixth century a.d., as a way of escaping the hunger

and destitution that prevailed among them; see al-Alusi, vol. 3, 386–387.

4. Qur’an 34:18–19. The passage clearly ordains and blesses traveling in “mea-

sured stages,” a norm that the Shebans sought to violate. The lesson was of course di-

rected at more contemporaneous traders. For interpretations of this passage, see Paret,

406; al-Baydawi, 568.

5. Khazanov, 157–158.

6. A series of droughts in Arabia occurred between a.d. 591 and 640. See Planhol,

443–469; Butzer, 359–371.

7. Frederick Barth offers comparable models of sedentarization on the basis of

his observations of nomadism in southern Persia. The four models he lists are given

the illuminating headings “drought and decline,” “defeat and degradation,” “failure

and fall-away,” and “succeed and surpass.”

Notes to Chapter 2 • 273



8. For a critical discussion of the sources, see Simon, 91–95.

9. Simmel, 510.

10. The “steps” outlined in the text should be seen as part of an ideological con-

tinuum rather than as discrete, historically recognizable moments.

11. For Max Weber, such a value determines the selection of spheres of interest inhuman action. See his The Methodology of the Social Sciences (1949), chapters 1, 2.

12. Qur’an 3:14 (translation altered). Other passages, e.g., 18:46 or 16:72, also list

offspring among God’s bounties in this world.

13. What must be kept in mind, however, is that such a discourse does not neces-

sarily identify the way the faithful actually thought of values. As Islam spread, many

adherents from various socioeconomies joined for different reasons. The important

element here is the development of a discourse that, as is evident in this passage, seeks

to ground the “self-evident” claim of abstract value upon an irrefutable source.

14. This attitude, which is perhaps related to the often noted “materialism” of pre-Islamic poetry, will be examined in more detail in Chapters 3 and 5.

15. For a comprehensive listing, see al-Karmali; also, al-Alusi, vol. 1, 264–266.

16. For details, see al-Maqrizi, ed. in al-Karmali, no. 25, 26–27. One of the more in-

teresting local standards was the weight of the coin in grains of barley. This of course

called for a further definition of what a “grain of barley” was; it was defined as one

of average size and free of long ends. The increase in the variety of coins is also evident

in the increase in the use of several denominations of the coinages of the empires in

Mecca before Islam.

17. This is not to suggest a simple-minded connection between a money economy and the decline of tribal solidarity. Rather, the idea is more that the growth of a gen-

eral method typified by abstract valuation indirectly and unintendedly furnishes new

ways of approaching an older system of social values.

18. Ibrahim (1990), 95–96.

19. The absence of coercion did not mean, however, the absence of threats, which

more often came from uncontrollable nomadic incursions upon the trade route than

from the empires. It also manifested itself in Abraha’s campaign, which in its own fail-

ure foreclosed future imperial adventures.

20. The prototypical example of such an attitude is Immanuel Kant’s “aesthetic in-

difference,”whereby the concern for the real existence of an object is distanced by the oc-

currence of its “form.” For example, a painting could claim a legitimate existence on its

own regardless of the existence of the object it purports to represent.See Simmel,73–75.

21. For example, 53:23 and elsewhere.

22. The development of intertribal trade may have cushioned the flourishing

hadarah lifestyle from the side effects of the opening of a direct maritime route between

Egypt and India during the first century a.d. Although by then Mecca was scarcely

visible in the trade routes, other peninsular merchants, from Yemen, Hadramaut, and

Bahrain, continued to import from India and east Africa for local consumption and

soon thereafter took advantage of the great increase in the Roman Empire’s consump-

tion of luxury items coming from those parts. See Rostovtzeff,95.




23. Braudel, vol. 2, 407–408. For discussion see Bamyeh, 28–29.

24. Al-Mas‘udi, vol. 2, 33.

25. Ibid., vol. 2, 188–191.

26. The same nonseasonal framework was preserved in setting the Islamic calendar.

27. Unlike in Bedouin society, where the accounts of raids mention negotiated set-tlements, there are reports that indicate more standard methods of calculating diyyah

(blood money) in Yathrib. See, for instance, Ibn al-Athir (1965), vol. 1, 659.

28. Testifying to Mecca’s obsession with the preservation of order, some reports

trace the city’s name to the ancient word “bekka,” which connoted a certain and swift

punishment for anyone who violated its peace; see al-Alusi, vol. 1, 227.

29. Simon, 24–31.

30. Ibid., 30.

31. See al-Alusi, vol. 1, 268–270.

32. For indications that the sacred months failed to garner much reverence amongmany Arabs, see Ibn Khaldun, 405; al-Mas‘udi, vol. 2, 197.

33. Ibn al-Athir (1965) reports that some Arabs, known as an-Nasa’ah on the basis

of their calendar, exchanged one of the forbidden months for the following one be-

cause they needed to raid during the month designated by the Quraysh as sacred. Al-

Mas‘udi (vol. 2, 30–31, 188) gives a relevant report about a month (an-Nasi’) that

some added to the lunar calendar once every three years in order to make up the dis-

crepancy between it and the solar calendar that was used by others. The result, in

terms of the forbidden months, would be an increase once in three years of a month in

which fighting was permitted, which did not sit well with the sedentary commercialsociety, as is evidenced in the Islamic verdict against such an addition to the calendar.

34. One report mentions that Safar, the month immediately following three suc-

cessive forbidden months, was given that name because it indicated that houses be-

came vacant, as its inhabitants went to war. See al-Masu‘di, vol. 2, 188–89. Whether

this philological deduction is correct is not the point here; what is important is, rather,

the observation itself, which, as is often the case in ancient histories, is then traced to

philological foundations. (Many modern historians, by contrast, proceed in the oppo-

site direction, moving from philology into historical deduction.)

35. Al-Hamadani, 299.

36. For an extended narrative, the best source is al-Azraqi, vol. 1, 157–165.

37. Ibn al-Athir (1965), vol. 1, 503. The report concentrates on the status of the

haram as the central point of contention. Significantly, it does not mention any acqui-

sition of spoils as a result of the campaign.

38. Ibid., 442. The failure of that attempt was probably one reason behind Abraha’s

subsequent campaign against Mecca, a campaign whose expressed sole purpose was

not “conquest,” permanent occupation, or acquisition but, rather, the destruction of

the Meccan haram.

39. Serjeant, 45.

40. For a summary of such reports, see Simon, 90.

41. The siqayah office had the responsibility for providing water, which involved




however, the same passage traces the evolution of a class society to God’s targeted

blessings.

52. The Qur’an adopts such an ethic as well, especially in its version of the story of

Sodom, where the lack of hospitality toward guests was sufficient reason for God to

obliterate the village.53. See al-Azraqi, vol. 1, 195.

54. Ibid., vol. 1, 257; al-Mas‘udi, vol. 2, 270–271. This embeddedness of the agree-

ment in formal and general trade logic shows that it is not as embedded in clannish

power politics as some commentators (e.g., Ibrahim [1990], 72) suggest.

55. Al-Alusi, vol. 3, 386–387.

56. For an illuminating discussion, see Ibrahim (1990), 41; Kister (1990).

57. The basic form of this argument can be found in a hitherto little known an-

thropological essay by E. R. Wolf (1951).

58. The confoundment of class and clan can also be seen in the original conflictover the haram services, which is reported to have taken place entirely within the

Abateh of Quraysh, with the Zawaher maintaining neutrality.

59. The prime example being its rejection of the offer of alliance from the Aus of

Yathrib. See Ibn al-Athir (1965), vol. 1, 677.

60. Ilaf agreements are reported to have existed with various local rulers in Syria,

Yemen, east Africa, and Persia and are said to have been organized by the descendants

of ‘Abd Manaf, one of the most important branches of the Abateh of Quraysh. For an

overarching review, see Hamidullah. The caravans could also forge a similar agree-

ment with the nomads controlling the route by marketing the nomads’ products andreturning a profit to them on the way back; for a discussion, see Simon, 64–65.

61. Of the dynasties of Yemen, they knew only the last, the Himyari (115 b.c.–a.d.

525), and to their north, they did not know the Nubtean state, which did not vanish

until its annexation to the Roman Empire in a.d. 106. They had no knowledge of

Rome, but knew only Byzantium.

62. History records not a single foreign military expedition directed at Arabia

itself. The Abyssinian campaign in the sixth century—the year of the elephant—was

intended not so much to lead to a permanent occupation or annexation as much as to

damage Mecca’s highly advertised role as a safe haven for trade, thereby allowing the

Abyssinian-occupied Yemen to compete with Mecca on that score. The Roman expe-

dition of Gallus Aeilus, targeting Yemen circa 24 b.c., avoided western Arabia and

sailed instead to the Red Sea coast north of Yemen. The expulsion of the Abyssinians

from Yemen at the hands of the Persians toward the end of the sixth century a.d., and

the subsequent transformation of Yemen into a Persian province, did not lead to any

further Persian expansion into the rest of the peninsula. The seaborne Persian expedi-

tion, just like the Roman one preceding it, also avoided the peninsular land route.

63. For an examination of caravan routes, especially those connected to the south-

ern trade, see Simon, 39–42.

64. Pliny counted sixty-five camel stations over a distance of 4,436,000 paces,which

is equivalent to approximately one station for every twenty-two miles. The most




93. See ‘Aqel, 212.

94. The title al-Maqsur (the confined one) was reportedly given him because he

confined the domain of governance strictly to what he had inherited from his father.

95. See Abu al-Fida’, vol. 1, 92.

96. For a comprehensive survey of the accounts regarding that episode, see ‘Ali,vol. 3, 333–338.

97. In a relatively short period, nearly all major tribes in the region could be ac-

counted among the Kinda’s constituents. Some of the main ones that can be found list-

ed in the sources include the Asad, Ghatfan, Bakr, Taghlib, Handhalah, Rabab, Nimr,

Qays, and branches of the Tamim, in addition to the previously subjugated tribes.

98. Olinder, 70.

99. Olinder, 122–128, lists different accounts concerning the allocation of the

tribes to the sons. The important point, sociologically speaking, is the very fact of this

division rather than its exact lines.100. Kinda rule over al-Hira lasted for only three to four years, commencing

around a.d. 524 or 525.

101. For an examination of such reports, see Olinder, 131–136.

102. Thus, for example, Bakr and Taghlib, which submitted at least nominally to

two different sons of al-Harith, reportedly caused the brothers to lead them in fighting

each other.

103. For a summary of the reports regarding this episode, see Olinder, 159-161.

104. The idea of this obligation permeates some of Imru’ l-Qays’s poetry, in a tone

that also addresses it as an unchosen and—because it undermines hedonistic possi-bilities in life—a clearly distracting goal.

3. social time, death, and the ideal

1. The three components formed a single economy in the sense that, taken to-

gether, they maintained and reproduced Bedouin life.

2. This feature is not a “weakness” of thought but, rather, a method of rendering

the world according to the same manner of systematicity by which it offers itself. On

this score, it is not far removed from the correspondence between pre-Islamic seden-

tary sociopolitical pluralism, on the one hand, and pagan polytheism, on the other.

3. Arberry (121–122) credits him with discovering Labid.

4. The only one that does not commence with the theme, that of ‘Amru Ibn

Kalthum, includes it nonetheless shortly afterward. Indeed, many compilers and

philologists have regarded that placement as marking the ode’s “true” opening.

5. As late as a couple of centuries after the coming of Islam, poetry lacking the

traditional opening continued to be held (at least officially) in less esteem. Some of the

reports surrounding the flamboyant poet Abu Nuwwas, for instance, mention that he

was forced by the Abbasid caliph to commence some of his poems with the narrator

standing at the ruins. In the preserved poem, Abu Nuwwas explicitly bemoans having

to revisit ruins that for him had little significance.




6. Hegel, 56. See also 114–118.

7. An-Nabigha’s aforementioned couplet 7, which abrogates the scene of the

ruins, clearly spells out how little value there is in such a site. Unlike the agonized

withdrawal found among earlier poets, an-Nabigha here feels confident enough to

recommend a specific and admirable mode of departure, upon which all belongingsare to be taken away: “Wan-mi l-qutuda ‘ala ‘ayranaten ujudi [And gather the rafters

on the back of a stiff-boned, energetic mare]” (c. 7). The health and vibrancy of the

animal stands out in contrast to the ruins’ dilapidated essence.

8. Al-Mas‘udi, vol. 2, 96 (emphasis added).

9. Ibid., 96–97.

10. Poetry is a significant source here precisely because it was not an exercise in

elite aesthetics. It was a depository of memorable forms and sayings, a widely dissemi-

nated oral tradition, and a compilation of events and heroic deeds. The poet gradually

became an important tribal institution.11. Another arena for idealization is the individual himself; the only poem among

the legendary ten that does not commence with a reminiscence of the past opens in-

stead with a valorization of pleasures, signified by excessive wine consumption.

12. The tribe as a major poetic theme appears more prominently in the odes as-

cribed to poets said to belong to a generation later than that of Imru’ l-Qays and

Tarafa. In the odes of these two individuals, the tribe is in essence a lost home, having

shown itself oblivious to their talents and in fact seeing their talents as justification for

their expulsion on the grounds that their innovation is incompatible with traditional

tribal duties. At a later point, when the poet became a significant social institution anda useful tribal propaganda machine, tribal themes became more established as parts of

the compositions.

13. For an extended examination of ritualistic structures in the tradition, see

Stetkevych.

14. For a more theoretically elaborate discussion of the social embeddedness of

distinctive language, see Mukarovsky, 49–56.

15. See ‘Ali, vol. 6, 102–162.

16. One may want to speculate on the relation between this materialism and the

necessity of revenge as an earthly redemption of a life that cannot be redeemed in any

other realm of existence.

17. For an extended discussion, see ‘Ali, vol. 5.

18. Ibn Hisham, cited in ‘Ali, vol.5, 125–126. The Qur’an itself documents this atti-

tude; 45:24.

19. In al-Harith’s opening, one encounters an element of sense perception that is

more prevalent only in the more sedentarily informed schemes of an-Nabigha and,

to a lesser extent, Labid. In the earlier odes, standing by the ruins was an exercise in

memory invocation and similarly structured abstractions. In other words, one used

none of the senses. But in the case of al-Harith, the ruins are paralleled by a sight

in the distance, where the social life from which the poet was separated could be seen

to reemerge someplace else. The whole experience is sensed: The poet is told of an




impending departure, then shown fire in the distance (i.e., the inevitable has already

occurred). The impact of the ruins is retrievable by the senses, even though the reality

of separation will persist. Here, we have, at last, a “social being,” inseparable from a

community of some sort, accustomed to feeling the presence of a society. The poet

here wanders alone no more; even when thinking abstractly, he finds his referencepoints always outworn, and,even in their most inert state, eroded by the wind of society.

20. This term is both temporal and spatial. It denotes periodicity since it is the

term for pilgrimage, and it also refers to well-trodden pathways (mahajja ).

21. For a somewhat useful history of the calendar, see al-Mas‘udi, vol. 2, 177,

188–196.

22. The “good morning” salute to the ruins begins another long poem ascribed to

Imru’ l-Qays (ala ‘im sabahan ayyuha t-talal l-bali ), which suggests common struc-

tures of recognition and commencement.

4. pre-islamic ontotheology and the method of knowledge

1. For one example of this attitude, see Hawting, 23–47. While far from being

unique in this approach, the article is a good demonstration of it.

2. Various reports seem to corroborate or hint at the weakness or even stark nov-

elty of paganism within Arabia. One such report mentions that the Hanifa consumed

their own idol, made of dates and ghee, in times of hunger (Ibn Qutaybah, 266).

Another mentions that the transaction transferring ownership of Mecca’s haram to

Quraysh involved no more than a goat and a jug of wine (al-Mas‘udi, vol. 2, 31).3. For a compendium of pre-Islamic belief and ritual systems, see ‘Alwan.

4. Ibn al-Kalbi, 8.

5. One possible explanation for the higher degree of respect for some idols has to

do with the relative power or prominence of the tribe with which it was identified. The

three most prominent idols, Lat, ‘Uzzah, and Manat, belonged respectively to Thaqif

of Ta’if, Quraysh of Mecca, and Aus-Khazraj of Yathrib. Hubal, probably a later ad-

dition, was also Quraysh’s. See Ibn al-Kalbi, 27. This pattern seems reminiscent of

Mesopotamian allocation of status and authority among different city’s gods in a way

that paralleled cities’ relative sociopolitical centrality.

6. Ibid., 9, 29.

7. I do not mean to imply that poets were all uprooted but merely that how they

began their odes was judged to a great extent on how eloquently they articulated

the idea.

8. The most important of such attempts, discussed in Chapter 2 in connection

with Abraha’s campaign, was in Yemen. Two others are mentioned in the sources, one

by Ghatfan, which was reportedly despoiled by Mecca. See Ibn al-Kalbi, 45.

9. Ibid., 22.

10. Qur’an 53:23.

11. The idea of “function” here is used merely to allude to some aspects of idol in-

fluence and role rather than to indicate straightforward instrumentality. The notion




does not presume that any such functions were intended to be fulfilled as such, and it

certainly does not restrict the idols to the realm of functionality.

12. Meeker, 105–107.

13. See ‘Alwan.

14. The earlier attempts to exclude the less-wealthy traders are judged in Qur’anichindsight as acts that displeased God and hence as the cause of the decline of Yemen’s

trade. See Qur’an 34:18–19, and the discussion of this verse in Chapter 2.

15. Here, the notion of stages is not meant to be chronological. Rather, it is em-

ployed merely to indicate three different circles, or discourses, or modes, or commu-

nicative practices, cohabiting a single formal tradition as it becomes more established.

16. It must be noted that the Qur’an itself, particularly in the early revelations,

shows a clear tendency to deliver wisdom through poetic structures. This aesthetic

dimension was maintained even when Qur’anic language shifted to saja‘ (rhymed

speech), a less commonly used form of rhythmic speech than the circulating poetry.The impact of the early rivalry with poetry lingered on and is explicitly addressed in

the Qur’an at one point, 26:221–226.

17. For some listings, see Ibn Qutaybah, 27–29; al-Alusi, vol. 2, 244–286.

18. This offer is strikingly similar to the one made to Muhammad during the deba-

cle of an-Najm revelation, to be discussed in Chapter 7. A variant on it is also docu-

mented in an early Qur’anic revelation, surah 109.

19. For a discussion of some of the most important compilations, see Kister

(1980), 33–57.

20. Ibid., 48.21. The use of such a statement in opening the treaty of Hudaybiyyah was, accord-

ing to the sources, a reason for consternation among many Muslims, who protested

Muhammad’s acquiescence to the use of that Qurayshan formula instead of the

Islamic “In the name of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful.” See the discussion of

Hudaybiyyah in Chapter 8.

22. Ritual suicide by starvation, or i‘tifad, seems to have been specific to early

Meccan settlement. It was apparently an outcome of an unanchored concept of mis-

fortune, whereby misfortune was not connected to any particular individual or group.

Thus, the experience of misfortune and the concept of justice remained delinked.

23. This opening, it may be said, finally answers the observation made by another

heroic poet of the period, ‘Antara, namely, that the tradition of the ruins imagery had

become too congested. It is perhaps no accident that such challenges to the tradition

could be spelled out only by tribal heroes.

24. This state of affairs may be contrasted to the thoroughly different example of

China, where early political centralization, though clearly connected to regulatory

efficiency and grand ethical systems such as Confucianism, was also correlated to the

absence of any high God other than cosmic representation via the emperor.

25. This does not contradict the fact that an Islamic state did eventually emerge. In

fact, many of the political contests following Muhammad’s death took place in the

context of a lack of clear prophetic or Qur’anic instructions regarding the rules and




10. For a discussion of this theme, see Abu Zaid, esp. 263.

11. The “Ahmar of ‘Ad” refers to a mythico-historic incident in which a holy camel

was slaughtered.

12. Qur’an 4:150; 47:26.

13. Ibid., 2:106. The Qur’an freely admits that some verses could be ambiguous,since their meaning was yet to be revealed even though their text was already available

(e.g., 3:78). An interesting episode of “forgetting” is a late Qur’anic reproach to

Muhammad for having failed to free himself from an impossible promise he had

made to one of his wives (see 66:1–2), even though the Qur’an had detailed a method

by which commitments of that nature could be absolved (5:89).

14. Couplet 36, which connects two sets of images, warrants some elaboration. In

Arberry’s translation, it begins thus: “Is such my camel? Or shall I enliken her to . . .”

In the original, this statement is contained in the brevity of two words (afatilka, amm,

“is (she) such, or . . .”). There is no explicit reference to the camel, nor to a project of likening; nor is there a first person pronoun. The original provides a sense that there

is a continuing awareness of the original object, that metaphorization is an unpro-

nounced activity. All such eliminations allow the distance between two metaphoric

cycles to be kept to a minimum.

15. Qur’an 48:29.

16. See, for instance, ibid., 63:6. The persistence of earthly conflict deflates the cos-

mological level of discourse, forcing it to address specific incidents on a continual

basis. The specificity of context, in turn, does not reduce the grand referential nature

of the corpus, as many of the early sahabah (companions to the prophet) were toobserve. It was afterward that such specific revelations, as a rule, became grounds for

general edicts. See, for example, al-Suyuti, vol. 1, esp. 39–40.

17. For example, see Qur’an 48:18, 26.

18. “How many generations [min qarnen], far greater in prowess, have We de-

stroyed before them! . . . They searched the entire land: but could not find a refuge?”

ibid., 50:36.

19. Ibid., 3:140.

6. prophetic constitution

1. Qur’an 48:8, 33:45.

2. Al-Tabari, vol. 2, 210–211.

3. There is one remarkable Qur’anic passage that goes one step beyond confirm-

ing that the known prophetic histories all come from the same source, asserting that

the faithful must also believe indiscriminately in what had been transmitted to all

such prophets. See Qur’an 2:136.

4. This can be seen in Qur’anic references that, even when they use earthly exam-

ples to demonstrate divine omnipotence, deny the possibility of knowing Allah through

existing categories of knowledge and valuation. For a famous example, see Qur’an

2:255.




5. For example, see ibid., 14:35.

6. See Qur’an 112:1–4; 19:88–92, 107–111; 10:68; 18:4–5; 43:81–82; 6:100–101;

23:91; 3:79–80; 4:171–172; 5:17, 72–75, 116–118; 9:29–30; 2:116.

7. Ibid., 6:159; 23:53; 2:116.

8. Ibid., 45:16–18; 2:92; 5:24; and elsewhere.9. This point emerged later in the development of the Qur’an in Medina, when

ethical rules and regulations were being formulated.Since many of such rules were ap-

parently deemed to be timeless, adherents of book religions were frequently accused

of suppressing Allah’s earlier directions to them. See ibid., 4:51; 3:75, 78; 5:47; 9:33;

62:50.

10. The Qur’an sought to defend Muhammad from rejection on these grounds by

refraining from listing reasons for Muhammad’s selection and instead invoking an in-

comprehensible divine will, which paid no respect to traditional habits of social rank.

See Qur’an 14:11 and before; 25:20, 56–57; 6:50; 7:63, 69; 43:31–32.11. Ibid., 108:3.

12. An interesting example concerns his approach to the Kalbians: He told them

they should worship Allah because he was the ultimate cause of the glory of their

“father’s name.”

13. See al-Tabari, 232; Ibn Hisham, 164.

14. Ibn Hisham, 568–569.

15. Qur’an 49:14. The word aslamna could also be rendered as “we commit our-

selves to Islam” or “we commit ourselves to live in peace” rather than “we profess

Islam.” For stronger denunciations, see 48:11–12, 15–16; 9:97–98.16. Compare this to the Qur’an’s emphatic denunciation of the Munafiqun (two-

faced) in Medina who, being part of a sedentary community over which the prophet

could exercise more continuous control, were offered no similar option.

17. Ibn Hisham, 168. The stories of Ibn Ubay and the Munafiqun, which seem to

contradict such a view, will be discussed in Chapters 7 and 8.

18. Al-Tabari, 248–249; Ibn Hisham, 167–168; Ibn Sa‘d, 148.

19. Muhammad’s final response, according to al-Tabari, Ibn Hisham, and Ibn Sa‘d,

was expressed invariably as follows: “I am of you, and you are of me. I will wage war

on whomever you wage war on, and I will make peace with whomever you make peace

with.”

20. Qur’an 96:1–5.

21. Such a reclusive quest apparently did not interfere with the proselytizing mis-

sion, as many of the early and well-known recruits to Islam continued to be brought

in not by Muhammad himself but, rather, by other close companions. See Ibn Hisham,

87–90. Indeed, even actual failures to bring recruits in, as in Muhammad’s early trip to

Ta’if, could be balanced by success in bringing in otherworldly recruits—the jinn—

around the same time. See Qur’an 72:1–2; 46:29–31. Also, al-Tabari, 231; Ibn Hisham,

162–68; Ibn Sa‘d, 142.

22. For example, Qur’an 73:1–7.

23. Al-Tabari, 196.




24. Ibid., 209; Ibn Sa‘d, 96–97.

25. Ibn Hisham, 79–80; al-Tabari, 205–206; Ibn Sa‘d, 129–130.

26. See, for example, Qur’an 3:26. Muhammad is frequently instructed to affirm

his mere humanness (e.g., 41:6, 6:50, and elsewhere).

27. During the early ‘Abbasid period, a fierce scholastic debate consumed the cir-cles of the Mu‘tazilah and other schools in Baghdad, whose centerpiece was the status

of the Qur’an within God’s acts of creation. For a more detailed account, see Fakhry,

esp. 77–80.

28. The tradition often indirectly addresses the notion of Muhammad’s distance

from God by showing the physical severity of the impact that each revelation had

upon him. See, for examples, Ibn Sa‘d, vol. 1, 131–132, Muslim, vol. 7, 82.

29. For example, 2:23; 59:21; 52:34; 10:38; 11:13; 17:88; 18:1; 13:31; 39:27–29.

30. A powerful verse in this regard is 17:88. It is significant in that it came in the

context of narrating Muhammad’s night journey to heaven, an episode whose truth-fulness many refused to believe. The Qur’an here cites itself as that which authenti-

cates the story.

31. See the discussion of Dahriyyah in Chapter 3 and the Qur’anic depictions of

pagan mockery of the idea of resurrection in 17:49; 16:38; 37:16–17; 41:39; 6:29;

45:24–25; 23:82–83; 13:5; 50:3.

32. Ibn Hisham, 105.

33. Qur’an 37:45–47; 56:18–19.

34. The literal translation of the second half of couplet 44, “In kunti jahilatan bima

lam ta‘lami,” is “should happen to be ignorant [of that which you do not know]” andnot Arberry’s “ignorant and uninformed,” which, to be sure, rectifies the flagrant tau-

tology of the original. At-Tibrizi offers a plausible rendition in prose form: The in-

tended statement, according to him, is “Have you asked the horses of what you know

not, if you should happen to be ignorant, daughter of Malik?” See at-Tibrizi, 100.

35. This hope and denial can take many forms. A variant on it is the theme of the

“mad poet,” who is pushed to madness by the inaccessibility of his desire. This theme

is explored in As‘ad Khairallah’s Love, Madness, and Poetry. His analysis, heavily influ-

enced by Jungian psychology, finds in the phenomenon of the mad poet-lover-seer an

attempt to visualize a distinct domain of the invisible before a unitary God comes to

claim both domains—the Here and the Beyond.

36. Unlike in the case of his later well-planned migration to Medina, the Qur’an

never clearly gave Muhammad permission to leave for Ta’if.

37. Traditional sources illustrate Muhammad’s dire need to avoid the appearance

of complete loss. Upon leaving Ta’if, he reportedly pleaded with its Thaqif inhabitants

not to let the Qurayshans know of the bad reception he had received there, apparently

so as not to endanger a tactical project of accentuating his position in Mecca by hint-

ing at a potential following that went beyond its boundaries. See al-Tabari, 230; Ibn

Hisham, 161.

38. Al-Tabari, 231; Ibn Hisham, 178. According to both historians, the two rejec-

tions came from al-Akhnas Ibn Shariq, who based his decision on the inferiority of his




own tribal standing to that of Muhammad’s clan, and Suhail Ibn ‘Amru, who com-

plained of the wide distance between his clan nasab (descent) and Muhammad’s.

Muhammad’s ultimate protector was to be al-Mut‘am Ibn ‘Uday, who had no close kin

relation to Muhammad either.

39. The instructions to Muhammad to not ignore the weak in his zeal to Islamizethe rich is clearly spelled out in the surah of ‘Abasa (Qur’an 80).The shift in emphasis to

non-Meccan Arabs,however, could also be attributed to the latent desire to elicit a more

favorable response in Mecca,namely, by proving the viability of Islam in other societies.

40. Ibn Hisham, 94.

7. the house of the umma and the spider web of the tribe

1. Qur’an 26:214–215.

2. Ibid., 111.3. This is not to say, however, that the rest of the revelations adhered to the same

spirit. Both the tone of anger and frustration and the humble positioning of the

prophet were to be partially abandoned later on, when the social meaning of prophet-

hood metamorphosed and demanded reframed orientations. In particular, the fact

that the question of selection refused to subside required the invention of new strate-

gies of approaching the community.

4. Qur’an 27:45.

5. For examples, see ibid., 26:124, 161; 29:36.

6. Ibid., 26:86.7. Ibid., 71:28 (emphasis added).

8. Qur’an 41:20–22.

9. Ibid., 7:57; 24:43.

10. Ibid., 29:67.

11. Ibid., 106.

12. In ibid., 105, Allah attributes the failure of the expedition to birds that he sent

to pelt Abraha’s army with clay pellets, until they became like “withered stalks of

plants which cattle have devoured.” Al-Tabari hints that the collapse of the army was

probably due to the outbreak of an epidemic; see 111–115.

13. Qur’an 29:41.

14. For an explicit association of the divine message and Mecca and surrounding

dwellings, see Qur’an 6:92; 42:7; 43:3; 44:58; 20:113; 19:97; 16:103; 41:44; 13:37; 14:4;

54:32, 40.

15. Al-Tabari, 219–220.

16. Qur’an 43:31–32.

17. The most remarkable example is perhaps Tarafa’s couplet 11.

18. See Ibn Hisham, 475.

19. Ibid., 474.

20. Ibid., 289 (emphasis added). The word “nas ” here clearly indicates “outsiders”

rather than the more generic and immediate “people.”




21. It could be argued, indeed, that although the notion of transtribal umma was

already in the making, it did not sufficiently influence political developments until the

overthrow of the Umayyads by the Abbasides, partially on the strength of a multiethnic

following that rejected the Umayyads’ almost exclusively—and avowedly—clannish

claim to legitimate rule.22. Qur’an 18:6, 8.

23. For example, see ibid., 73:10.

24. Al-Tabari, 218; Ibn Hisham, 90–91; Ibn Sa‘d, 133.

25. Qur’an 36:26.

26. Ibid., 21:51–54; 26:69–77, 81; 14:41.

27. Ibid., 12:91–93.

28. Ibid., 12:95.

29. For further discussion of similar symbols in the mu‘allaqat, see the discussion

of the odes of Zuhair, an-Nabigha, and Labid in Chapters 3 and 5.30. Al-Waqidi, 1–19; also Ibn Hisham, 263–270.

31. Qur’an 2:216.

32. Ibid., 2:190–191, 217; 22:39–40, 58–59; 4:89–90. War began to gradually take

precedence over all else. In very elaborate discourses, the Qur’an told the Muslims that

even worship rituals could be compromised for its sake. The Qur’an told the faithful

that they could shorten their prayers if they were on alert, that some of them could

pray while others stood vigilant, how they could arrange their ranks for readiness

while praying, and even what to do if it rained in that circumstance. See 4:101–103.

33. But excluded from animosity among Mecca’s people were those who weremembers of social units with whom the Muslims had treaties and those who were

neutral and unwilling to fight against either side. This group included the Muslims

who stayed in Mecca. See Qur’an, 4:90.

34. Ibid., 5:2.

35. Ibid., 2:191–194.

36. Ibid., 2:217.

37. Ibid., 2:158.

38. Ibid., 22:28–37.

39. Ibid., 2:143. See also Ibn Hisham, 233–234; al-Tabari, 265.

40. Though it is true that the later qibla was technically directed toward the haram

rather than Mecca itself, it must be kept in mind that it was the haram that epitomized

Mecca’s sanctity and special standing in the world.

41. “Those to whom the scriptures [Jews and Christians] were given know this [the

Qur’an] to be the truth from their Lord. God is never heedless of what they do. But

even if you gave them every proof they would not accept your qibla, nor would you ac-

cept theirs; nor would any of them accept the qibla of the other. If, after all the knowl-

edge you have been given, you yield to their desires, then you will surely become an

evildoer” (Qur’an 2:144–145). Hurgronje argues that Muhammad’s change of the

qibla was only due to his rejection by the Jews of Medina, which moved him to aban-

don symbols of affinity with the people of the book for the sake of constructing a




purely Arab religion. This argument, however, misses the continuing centrality of

Mecca itself—and not Arab societies at large—in the thought of the Muhajirun.

42. Qur’an 2:144 (emphasis added). See also 2:149–150.

43. Ibn Hisham, 276. See also Qur’an 8:5–7.

44. For a more detailed survey of Medinian fortresses, see Lecker’s “Muhammad atMedina: A Geographical Approach.” Lecker argues that many further developments in

Medina, such as the expulsion of the Jews, simply completed processes that had start-

ed long before Muhammad. See also Kister (1968), 145–149.

45. Ibn Hisham, 317–318; al-Waqidi, 176 and after, 219, 416. For a more extended

exposition regarding other examples, see Gil, who argues that Ibn Ubay’s differed

from other, anti-Muslim Hanifs; 87 and after.

46. The next time Muhammad resolved to expel a Jewish tribe from Medina, Ibn

Ubay reportedly showed no interest in defending them as vigorously as he had the first

tribe. The consolidation of the Muslims’ unity allowed them to gradually expel all theJewish tribes from Medina, in the process confiscating their wealth. The extra income

was used to relieve the Ansar of the economic burden of supporting the Muhajirun.

See al-Waqidi, 368–372, 379.

47. Qur’an 68:17–33.

48. Ibid., 27:45–46.

49. Ibid., 28:4.

50. Ibid., 17:95. See also 6:8–9.

51. See ibid., 23:24–25, 47; 7:63, 69; 6:33.

52. Ibid., 17:54; 10:108; 6:107. Muhammad’s role as nadhir, however, lasted only foras long as he was in Mecca,being referred to less and less in the later course of his career.

53. Ibid., 10:71.

54. Ibid., 50:45; 25:63; and elsewhere. In fact, the Qur’an became so defensive at

that juncture that the few Muslims were for a brief period instructed to refrain from

attacking the idols. See 6:108.

55. “Say: ‘Unbelievers, I do not worship what you worship, nor do you worship

what I worship. I shall never worship what you worship, nor will you ever worship

what I worship. You have your religion, and I have mine.’” Ibid., 109.

56. Al-Tabari, 219.

57. Ibid., 225–226; Ibn Hisham, 137.

58. Muhammad, on the other hand, never pressed his uncle on the issue. According

to al-Tabari, it was in connection to that encounter that Muhammad learned from God

that the latter guided only whom he pleased, and not necessarily whom the prophet

loved. Here, the prophet is further relieved of the responsibility to reverse traditional

hierarchies and customary relations. Al-Tabari, 219. See also Ibn Hisham, 160.

59. Qur’an 43:40–43.

60. Ibn Hisham, 130–144.

61. This was evidently a gradual discovery. Though apparently no Qurayshan dis-

puted Abi Talib’s right to protect his nephew, some did question his entitlement to

protect another relative from the clan of Banu Makhzum, who was not as close to him




in terms of nasab line. Mahmood Ibrahim (1990) argues that the failure of the boycott

resulted from the fact that it was a “clan-based response to a nonclan-based social

movement” (79).

62. Al-Tabari, 228–229; Ibn Sa‘d, 140–141; Ibn Hisham, 142–144.

63. Qur’an 53:1–5, 11–12, 17–18, 32.64. Al-Tabari, 226–228; Ibn Sa‘d, 137. See also Ibn Manzur, vol. 10, 286-288. Ibn

Sa‘d introduces the report as follows: “When Muhammad saw his people abandoning

their harassment of him, he sat down by himself, wishing that nothing be revealed to

him which would drive them away.” Al-Tabari reports two similar versions.

65. Al-Tabari, 227–228; Ibn Sa‘d, 137.

66. “They are but names which you and your fathers have invented: God has vested

no authority in them. The unbelievers follow vain conjectures and the whims of their

own souls, although the guidance of their Lord has long since come to them” (Qur’an

53:23).67. Ibid., 22:52–53. On the general possibility of changing verses, see 16:101.

68. Later developments, however, led to the incorporation of a certain degree of

politically calculated tribalism, though it followed more theologically sophisticated

deliberations.

69. Sira sources attribute their return to the lure of a false report of the Islamici-

zation of Mecca following the revelation of the verses in question. Upon their arrival,

however, they only saw a city bitterly divided among antagonistic camps. Those who

entered it had to either immediately seek clannish protection (ijara ) or simply hide.

The rest reportedly went back to Abyssinia.70. Qur’an 80:1–10.

71. Chief among them were the later caliphs Abi Bakr and ‘Umar. The latter was re-

portedly more renowned and respected for his ruthless manners than for his wealth or

social affinities.

72. See Qur’an 26:111; 11:27.

73. Ibid., 26:112–114; 11:29.

74. Ibid., 18:32–42.

75. Ibid., 16:75–76.

76. It is significant in this respect that when the Qur’an adopted the Biblical image

comparing the passage of the rich into paradise with the passage of a camel through

the eye of a needle, it replaced the rich with the more general category of those who

scorn Allah’s revelations. See 7:40.

77. Ibid., 6:165. A somewhat similar aya is 43:32.

78. Ibid., 16:71.

79. Ibid., 42:27.

80. Ibid., 17:16 (translation altered to render the original as literally as possible).

81. Ibid., 38:58–64; 40:47–48; 14:21.

82. In ibid., 56:7–40, people are amassed on the Day of Judgment in three groups

rather than two. The first two constitute the believers: One band of them includes

“many” of the early believers and only “a few” of the later ones, while the other con-




tains “many” of the early and likewise,“many” of the later ones. The distinction evapo-

rates, however, when the privileges of each band in paradise are listed, for they turn

out to be the same.

83. Ibid., 52:23.

84. Ibid., 45:28.85. Ibid., 43:32–35.

86. Ibid., 23:51–53. A similar verse is 6:159, which is followed by a call to return to

the common path of Abraham, the hanif. See also 42:14; 19:37; 11:110.

87. Ibid., 42:15. This revelation was never repealed or altered by any other. With

some important exceptions, such as the issue of Jesus’s divinity, the settlement of

many theological sources of controversy (e.g., the sanctity of the Sabbath) was de-

clared to be postponed until the Day of Judgment. See 16:124–125.

88. The commentator at-Tibrizi offers three interpretations regarding the nature

of this “unfamiliar muster”: a plan (of fate?), a war, or a meeting location (Qubbat an-Nu‘man).

89. Interestingly, the only characterization alludes to the ghostly, trans-human

world of the jinn (c. 71).

90. Ibn Hisham, 262.

91. Ibid., 196–197; al-Tabari, 256.

92. Qur’an 8:73, 75.

93. Ibid., 60:1–3, 9; 58:14, 22.

94. Ibid., 19:47.

95. Ibid., 60:4. At a later stage, and after years of bitter war, the Qur’an recalledand corrected this aspect of Abraham’s story, forbidding Muhammad and the faithful

from interceding on behalf of idolaters among their close relatives. See 9:112–113.

96. Ibid., 49:9–10.

97. Ibid., 4:92.

98. Both were essentially tax revolts. For a Qur’anic condemnation of the no-

mads’ reluctance to accept any form of taxation, see 9:98.

99. At one point, the Meccans took for granted that the ancient respectability of

the trade route—underwritten by the openness and peace of Mecca itself—was out

of date, and they violated one of the cornerstones of the peace of their city by arrest-

ing an unsuspecting Muslim pilgrim. They released him only in exchange for some of

their prisoners of war taken by the Muslims. See Ibn Hisham, 296.

100. Ibid., 444.

101. Qur’an 49:14–15, 17; 9:97–98; 48:11–12, 15–16; 22:11.

102. Al-Waqidi, 757.

103. “There has now come to you an apostle of your own, one who grieves at your

sinfulness and cares for you; one who is benevolent and merciful to true believers”

(Qur’an 9:128, emphasis added).

104. Ibn Hisham, 430; al-Tabari, 73.

105. An additional factor is that by the time of the Peace of Hudaybiyyah, the

Muslims were probably not sufficiently powerful to overrun Mecca, either in number




or in resolve. Mecca itself continued to command relatively formidable resources.

Slightly more than a year before, the city had organized a large army—reported to have

totaled ten thousand combatants—and, with the aid of its Bedouin allies, laid a one-

month siege against Medina before retreating without a fight. It is possible to argue that

the march to Mecca that culminated in the Peace of Hudaybiyyah was viewed by theMuslims as a potential takeover, but the refusal of most of their own Bedouin allies to

join the march without assurances of a share in the spoils of an uncertain fight quickly

undermined the spirit of the expedition. According to Ibn Hisham, it was on his way

back to Medina that Muhammad received from Allah the revelation of the surah of

al-Fath (or at least portions thereof), which included extremely hostile denunciations

of the treachery of the Bedouins; see 438–439. (Sociohistorical references in al-Fath,

however, are ambiguous and could just as well pertain to the later takeover of Mecca.)

106. Ibn Hisham, 432 (emphasis added).

107. Al-Tabari in particular (80–81) extensively details the collapsed spirits of theMuslims after the news of the treaty.

108. The main textual landmark of this transformation is perhaps the aforemen-

tioned surah of ‘Abasa.

109. Ibn Hisham, 440–441.

110. Two major expeditions are reported to have been organized after the treaty,

one against the northern town of Khaibar, the single most important Jewish strong-

hold in the peninsula, and another against a massive Roman army stationed even fur-

ther to the north, near Mu’tah. The expedition to Khaibar was a success; that to Mu’tah

was a disaster.111. For example,‘Abdullah Ibn Sa‘d, a former Muslim who had defected to Quraysh

earlier, was not only forgiven but eventually assigned provincial governorships by later

caliphs.See al-Waqidi,830–838; Ibn Hisham, 472–475.

112. Al-Waqidi, 837–838.

113. Aside from the model of Kinda, the demand for central sources of arbitration

is evident in more contemporaneous reports. One such report mentions that the

Christians of Najran to the south asked Muhammad to act as a regulator of their social

and economic affairs, even as they declined to join Islam. See Ibn Hisham, 258.

114. The armies of conquest rarely returned to the peninsula; families eventually

united with soldiers in the new frontier settlements. This massive population move-

ment eventually had a political price; the Arabian Peninsula, soon after the conquests,

reverted to a peripheral political status within the subsequent Islamic empires rather

than remaining their center of gravity.

115. Qur’an 48:12, 16 (emphasis added).

8. austerity, power, and worldly exchange

1. Qur’an 7:179.

2. The generally more aggressive Medinian Qur’an seems to have earnestly be-

lieved in the antiquated bestiality of such heedless opponents; see, for instance, 5:33.




3. Ibn Hisham, 275, 278; al-Waqidi, 42–45. Once the war started in earnest, how-

ever, Mecca proved to be capable of fighting back. A year after Badr, the city managed

to assemble a larger and more determined army, incorporating many Bedouin allies,

the Ahabish, and even some expatriate Aussians from Medina, and took revenge by

defeating the Muslims in Uhud near Medina. The Qur’an claimed that Allah’s angelstook a role in bringing about the victory at Badr. See 8:9, 17; 3:124–125.

4. Qur’an 3:157–158, 164–166, 169–174. Even those among the Muslims who

retreated during that unfortunate episode were pronounced to be absolved, as the

great compassion with which the dead were remembered engulfed them as well. See

3:152–155.

5. Qur’an 41:20–22.

6. For example, ibid., 24:23–24.

7. Ibid., 24:2–21.

8. A basis for this idea can perhaps be traced to the early Qur’anic affirmation of the unreliability of pathways taken by following immediate human wishes. See 6:116.

9. Qur’an 33:4 (emphasis added). “The wives whom you divorce as your moth-

ers” refers to a pre-Islamic Arabic formula for a divorce declaration, where the hus-

band would state to his wife: “Be [as forbidden] to me as my mother’s back.”

10. Ibid., 33:72.

11. Ibid., 2:189; 78:9–11. In general, passive reception of divine instructions was

the model through which the Qur’an was revealed. The point is accentuated through

God’s periodic reproach of Muhammad, who on occasions was portrayed as either

wishing to suppress some revelations or lacking firm feelings for them. See, for in-stance, 11:12.

12. Ibid., 4:2, 5, 10.

13. For a fuller exposition of this orientation, see Ibrahim (1990), esp. 87.

14. Qur’an 4:6.

15. Ibid., 2:282–283; 5:106–108.

16. Ibid., 5:106–108; 4:11–12, 176; 2:180.

17. Ibid., 28:23–28.

18. “Do they [the Meccans] not see how We have given them a sanctuary of safety,

while all around them men are carried off by force?” (29:67).

19. Early Islam did not fare well in stable agricultural communities; Ta’if, for in-

stance, was one of the last bastions in the peninsula to yield to Muhammad’s authority,

and then only by force. The animosity (or unfamiliarity of) the Muhajirun toward

that form of economy is encapsulated in a saying attributed to Muhammad, who,

upon seeing a plowshare in the house of one of the Ansar, reportedly commented:

“This does not enter the abode of a people without lowliness following it.” See Ibn

Khaldun, 702.Also, al-Waqidi, 922–938.

20. See, for example, Qur’an 2:16, 268, 281; 3:117, 181; 9:120–121; 61:10; 24:37;

64:16-17; 48:29; 57:25.

21. Ibid., 9:111 (emphasis added).

22. Ibid., 24:36–38.




23. Alms may have been introduced during lulls between major military confisca-

tions. As such, they redistributed income within the umma rather than relying on con-

tinuous warfare and ultimately reduced dependence on the warriors as a major source

of social income.

24. Qur’an 2:245, 254. Similar verses can be found in 2:261, 265; 64:17; 57:11.25. For an informative though largely philological discussion, see Bravmann, 176,

229–253.

26. Ibrahim (1990) argues that Muhammad’s early preoccupation with alms (zakah),

as opposed to sadaqah, can be construed as an indication of abandoning tribal fellow-

ship in exchange for universal individual responsibility; see 82.

27. For an example of this, see the discussion of the “market of the prophet” in

Kister (1965), 272–276. See also Lecker, 53.

28. Qur’an 47:38.

29. Ibid., 3:181.30. Ibid., 9:79–80.

31. Passages like these were used by some commentators, notably Taha Husain, to

contest the historical authenticity of the mu‘allaqat. This argument has been effective-

ly challenged (for a summary of the debate, see Arberry). One point that needs to be

added here, however, is that the error seems to stem from a perception that the idea of

Allah is a peculiarly Islamic notion that appeared in a quantum fashion at a specific

point in time rather than an emergent notion that underwent long mutations before it

crystallized in one form.

32. My objective here—unlike the philologist’s or historian’s—is not to find theculprit between the lines but to ponder this ambiguity. This portion of the discourse

seems to be so delicately structured as to refer simultaneously to both specific events

and universal conditions incumbent upon wandering. It is impossible to name the

party meant by Zuhair with certainty.

33. Another example of the rationalization of war was the standard ransom that was

to be paid for the release of prisoners of war. The Qur’an specifically forbade Muslims

from holding infidels as prisoners of war once such ransom was paid off. See 47:4.

34. Al-Waqidi, 131–138; Ibn Hisham, 290–291; Qur’an 8:1.

35. Qur’an 8:41. The origins of the ratio of one-fifth are not clear. It is probable

that it simply represented an institutionalization of an ongoing practice; some reports

indicate that before this revelation, the warriors were already, on their own volition,

giving the prophet exactly one-fifth of what they gained in war (Ibn Hisham, 268).

36. Qur’an 93.

37. Qur’an 59:6–10. In this same Qur’anic sequence, the disgruntled warriors are

appeased by being designated with special praise. Though they were indirectly re-

minded that the umma could also survive through means other than permanent war-

fare, no mention was made of the fact that in this instance, it was the Muslims’ mili-

tary might that had made other communities “voluntarily” pay the Muslim community

a designated sum of their wealth.

38. Ibid., 3:130.




39. Ibid., 2:275–279.

40. In contemporary sociological theory, this theme was highlighted in the idea of

ethnomethodology. With particular reference to courtroom deliberations, Harold

Garfinkel argued that jurors first decide on the basis of “common sense” and then pro-

ceed to find a matching statement of law. See Garfinkel, 104–115.

9. in lieu of a conclusion

1. Rodinson modifies this deterministic position on 298.

2. A little-known Arab Marxist was one of the first to pose the problem, denying

that the prophet had intended to construct a great empire. See al-Jawzi, 202–208.

3. See Ibrahim (1990), 8.

4. See for instance Gellner’s Muslim Society. In Gellner there is an assumption of

singular exceptionalism vis-à-vis an outside world, which may be compared to Watt’sassumption of the integrative cohesion of Muslim society.

5. Belyaev, 73.

6. See for instance Rodinson, 295. In Muslim societies today, various orders of

governance could use Qur’anic citations to justify various relationships toward gover-

nance. For instance, under conditions of civil strife, e.g., in Afghanistan or Algeria, the

common citations tend to stress brotherhood of believers (e.g., 49:10), whereas under

conditions of authoritarian rule, e.g., in Saudi Arabia, they tend to stress obedience to

authorities (e.g., 4:59).

7. Ibrahim (1990), 89.8. H. M. T. Nagel, 1982, “Some Considerations Concerning the pre-Islamic and

the Islamic Foundations of the Authority of the Caliphate,” in G. H. A. Juynboll, ed.,

Studies on the First Century of Islamic Society. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University

Press, pp. 177–197.

9. For a discussion of this point, see Ibrahim (1990), 92–93.

10. Nagel, 188.

11. For a full discussion, see Landau-Tasseron, esp. 13.

12. This is not to suggest the primacy of “function” in interpreting the role of a deity.

Rather, the idea concerns only one line of argument explicitly highlighted by Muham-

mad in order to show the uselessness of former deities. Other attributes of Allah, or the

idols for that matter, cannot be simply confined to the functional perspective.

13. For a full discussion, see Fakhry, especially regarding the rise of scholasticism,

51–81.

14. For an interesting discussion, see Harvey, esp. 55–67. The appeal was frequently

ignored or reinterpreted when conditions for the hijra were not appropriate. But the

original experience had established a textual/referential basis for claims to its manda-

tory legality.

15. For a summary of one of the most obvious of such conflicts, which manifested

themselves at the peak of Muhammad’s power in Medina, see Gil, 65–96.

16. Bashir (1978), 77, cited in Asad, 463.




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305

Index

Aaron, 145

‘Abbas Ibn ‘Abd al-Muttaleb, al-, 154

‘Abd l-Muttaleb, 99, 207

‘Abdullah Ibn Ubay, 201–202,

271–272 n. 5

Abi ‘Amer (of Medina), 98

Abi Bakr, 148–149, 260

Abi Dharr al-Ghafary, 150

Abi Jahl, 207

Abi Lahab, 180, 192, 207

Abi Sufian, 228

Abi Talib, 173, 206–207, 214

Abraha, campaign of, 31, 224,

275 n. 38

Abraham, 6–7, 34, 145, 180, 195, 219,

224; faith of, 97–98, 146, 171

‘Abs, tribe of, 42, 246, 248

abstraction: money economy and,

x–xi, 20–29, 39, 274 n. 13,

274 n. 20; nomads and, 6, 20–22,

51; as philosophical concept, 58

Abu Zaid, Nasr Hamed, 116

Abyssinia, 6, 21, 32–33, 40, 185, 224;migration to, 162, 173–174, 210,

292 n. 69

Adam, 120–121, 144

‘Aden, 18

Aesop, 101

agrarian life: in Islam, 243, 262; labor

and right in, 34–36; low status of,

23, 30, 34, 295 n. 19; settlement

and, 5, 18, 20

Ahabish, al-, 20, 225

Ahlaf, al-, 20

‘Ali Ibn Abi Taleb, 150, 259

alienation, 69, 96–97, 240, 264

Allah. See God

alms, 220, 243–245, 251, 296 n. 23

Amalikites, 85

‘Amer, tribe of, 35–36

‘Amer Ibn ad-Darb, 100

‘Amru al-Maqsur, king of Kinda,

48–49

‘Amru Ibn Kalthum, 92–94, 111–112,

157; heroics in, 138–139; knowl-

edge in, 177–178; as leader,

159–160, 163; as spokesman of

tribe, 127, 162, 176, 181–186, 215,241

Ansar, 153–155, 190, 198–199, 245,



252; attitude toward Muhammad,

200–202, 216–17, 266; relation to

Muhajirun, 218, 220, 260

‘Antara Ibn Shaddad, 15, 89, 93, 125,

127–129, 133, 176, 241; knowl-edge in, 156–157, 163–170,

177–178

Arberry, A. J., xiii

Arkoun, Mohammed, 116

‘asabiyyah. See solidarity

Asad, tribe of, 51, 261

A’sha, al-, xiii, 68–69, 119, 126–127,

241Aus (of Medina), 20, 42, 154, 201,

219

Badr, battle of, 190, 198, 200–201,

231–232, 251

Bahrain, 9, 11, 21, 40, 129, 272 n. 11

Bakr, tribe of, 42, 46–47, 49, 62

Ba’laam, 101Bashir, Sulayman, viii, 258

Basus, war of, 46, 62

Bedouins. See nomadism; nomads

Bekri, al-, 17

Belyaev, E. A., 258

Bilal the Abyssinian, 150

Book of Proverbs, 110

Bostra, 18, 40Braudel, Fernand, 30

Bravmann, M. M., 96

Brockelmann, Carl, 90

Byzantium, 18, 21, 32, 40–41, 43, 50,

52

calendar, pre-Islamic, 30, 73,

275 n. 33

camel: capacity of, 12, 22, 273 n. 15;

as means of transportation, 21; as

medium of exchange, 21; as a

metaphor for movement, 7,

13–15; as thematic unity, 69,

135–137, 273 n. 16; value of, 24; as

vehicle of escape, 187Christianity, 79, 98; paganism and,

90, 146

Christians, 26, 119, 215

Crone, Patricia, viii, 30, 271–272

n. 5

Dabbi, al-Mufaddal al-, xiii

Dahes wa l-Ghabra’, war of, 46Dar an-Nadwah, 33, 37, 267

Daumat al-Jandal, 18

David, 101–104, 106

Dawood, N. J, xiii

Day of Judgment, 154, 213–214;

hierarchies on, 284 n. 30, 292–293

n. 82; kin relation on, 219

death. See lifedesert: demographic pressures in, 46;

nature of, 3–4; in odes, 8; trade in,

29

Dhi Qar, battle of, 41, 278 n. 69, 278

n.71

Dhubyan, tribe of, 42, 246, 248

diyyah (blood money), 12, 42, 91,

219–220, 247, 275 n. 27Durkheim, Emile, 24

Egypt, 21, 196, 204

Empty Quarter, 3

Evans-Pritchard, Edward E., 44

exchange: hierarchy of items in, 23;

in holy sites, 85; as model of rela-

tionship to God, 243; nomads

and, 45; in the Qur’an, 236–237,

242; 252–253; social boundaries

306 • Index



of, x–xi; standards of, 25, 274

n. 16. See also trade

Fadak, 252

feudalism, 36, 276 n. 45forbidden months, 29, 31–32, 39,

198–199, 275 n. 33, 275 n. 34

Gabriel, archangel, 144, 161

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, ix

Gellner, Ernest, 258

geography, ancient, 9–10; notion of

pilgrimage and, 32; in odes, 86Ghassanides, 41–42, 49–50, 54

Ghatfan, Banu (tribe of), 32

Gibb, Hamilton A., 90

God: in commerce, 95, 236; contrac-

tual aspects of, 243; early mean-

ings of, 105–106, 204, 239–240; as

an experimental concept within

paganism, 26, 89–91, 114,208–209, 296 n. 31; as guarantor

of peace, 203, 248; haram and,

185, 203; as hidden sovereign,

109; monotheistic nature of, 262;

moral void and, 255; as an out-

come of economic value, 29; pa-

ternal character of, 145; as recipi-

ent of charity, 243–244, 251; assedentary construct, 6, 238; as

source of economic value, 23–24;

as source of human subjectivity,

233–235; as source of miracles,

67; as source of wealth, 212,

276–277 n. 51; symbolization and,

133; transcendental nature of, 78,

113, 160–161, 210, 254, 264–265,

286 n. 4; unaccountability of, 267.

See also Qur’an

Gospel, 243

Gramsci, Antonio, 158

Habermas, Jürgen, 264

Hadramaut, 10, 11, 47halting (in odes), 118, 123; as inter-

ruption of norm, 129; nomadic

life and, 6–7, 130; realization of

loss in, 13

Hanifism, 26, 34, 79, 143, 150, 260;

abstraction and emergence of, 28;

prophethood in, 98, 179, 263–265

haram, 11, 223; Abraham as founderof, 34, 224; compared to ruins, 85;

fornication in, 81–82; as house of

God, 185, 203; as house of idols,

87–88, 91, 153; as item of ex-

change, 34–35, 276 n. 48; migra-

tions away from, 85; openness of,

225; in the Qur’an, 199, 202; sanc-

tuaries competing with, 32–33,91, 275 n. 37; as sanctuary, 31,

199, 228; service functions of, 33,

37–39, 228, 275–276 n. 41; as site

of pilgrimage, 29, 32. See also

Mecca

Harith, al-, king of Kinda, 49–50, 52

Harith, Ibn Hilliza al-, of Bakr,

94–95, 117, 119; as spokesman of tribe, 127, 182, 241

Hashemites, 148, 173, 186, 206–208,

210, 214

Hawazen, tribe of, 31, 91

hawta, 33

hedonism, 64, 70–71, 92, 138, 177,

246. See also odes

Hegel, G. F. W., 58

Heidegger, Martin, ix

hermeneutics, ix

Index • 307



Hijaz, 9, 18; agriculture in, 5, 30;

isolation of, 40, 277 n. 61,

277 n. 62; marketplaces of, 29

Hijr (Akel al-Murar), king of Kinda,

47-49Hijr Ibn al-Harith, king of Kinda, 51

Himyar, 47, 48, 50

Hira, al- (lower Mesopotamia),

49–50, 117, 162, 182, 184

history, philosophy of, viii–xii, 258

Hudaybiyyah, Peace of, 223–228,

230, 251, 260, 264, 268, 283 n. 21,

293–294 n. 105hums, 40

Husayn Ibn Damdam, 248

Ibn al-Anbari, xiii

Ibn al-Kalbi, 82, 85

Ibn Hisham, xiii, 175, 227

Ibn Kaisan, xiii

Ibn Khaldun, 17, 19Ibn Qutaybah, xiii

Ibn Sa‘d, xiii

Ibrahim, Mahmood, 37, 258, 260

Idols. See paganism

Idris, prophet, 145

ilaf, 40, 48, 277 n. 60

Imru’ l-Qays, 7, 57, 81, 147, 162,

272 n. 4; approach to past in, 85,172; duty in, 193–195, 280 n. 104;

as “founder” of poetry, 83–84, 249;

hedonism of, 64, 177, 192–193; as

kingship claimant, 51–52, 241; as

outcast, 69, 74, 89, 170, 176–177;

poetic structure in, 56

India, 21, 43

‘Iraq, 9, 41, 67, 131

Isbahani,Abi al-Faraj al-, xiii

Islam: concept of forbidden months

in, 32; in the context of paganism,

80–81, 88–89; earlier traditions in,

200, 259–260, 263–265; estrange-

ment from Mecca of, 190, 224,

266; experimental nature of, 261;meanings of the word, 100, 151,

284 n. 39; political centralization

and, 47, 52, 229, 258, 261, 263,

294 n. 113; as sedentary religion,

200, 229; social classes and, 202,

211, 213, 258; social unity in, 146,

220, 245; state and, 257–261; uni-

versalization of, 185–186, 191,217–218, 227, 229, 266–267; as

verbal allegiance, 224, 287 n. 15.

See also Muhammad; Muslims;

Qur’an; umma

Ismael,“father of the Arabs,” 146

Istakhri, al-, 9

i‘tifad. See suicide

Jehova, 145

Jerusalem, 200

Jesus, 146; disciples of, 155; miracles

of, 116; Muhammad and, 98, 145

Jews, 26, 119, 215; in Medina, 20,

200–201, 252, 291 n. 46; as tribal

identity, 80

jinn, 105, 119, 174Jones, Sir William, 70

Joseph, 195–197; Muhammad and,

145

Judaism, 79–80, 98; paganism and,

90, 146

Jurham, tribe of, 36

justice: emergence of Islamic

concepts of, 220, 242, 244, 262;

in nomadism, 94–95, 237–238,

281 n. 16; as outcome of concept

308 • Index



of life, 232; through poetic lan-

guage, 235, 241, 246–251, 253; in

poetry, 93–94; prophet and, 215;

under sedentarism, 99–100,

135–136; stratification and, 68,102–103; trade and, 91; witness-

ing and, 236–237

Khadija, 150, 158, 173

Khaibar, 153, 252

Khalid Ibn Sinan, 97

Khazanov, Anatoli, 19, 43–45

Khazraj (of Medina), 20, 42, 151,154, 201, 219

Khuza‘ah, tribe of, 36, 90

Kinda, kingdom of, 30, 43–44,

46–52, 106, 153, 193–194, 221,

229, 280 n. 97

Kister, M. J., 90

knowledge: believers and, 259; codi-

fication of, 119; distant, 124; di-vine, 158, 200, 235–236; imma-

nence of, 94, 241; Luqman and,

101–102, 110–111; mystical,

121; in odes, 157–158, 163–170,

177–178, 240, 248–249, 253;

political authority and, 107–109;

prophetic, 160, 239; time and, 72,

77–78; uniqueness of, 139Kuhn, Thomas, 86

Labid Ibn Rabi‘ah, 13–14, 55, 89,

133, 157, 162, 176; approach to

the past in, 57, 85; belonging in,

186–189, 215–216, 240–241; as

judge, 127, 245–246; structural

elements in, 134–138, 183; vision

of nature in, 121–124

Lachmides, 49

Life: code of conduct in, 76–78,

253–255; as coherent subjectivity,

233–234; as ethical question,

63–65, 232; finitude in, 69–70, 96,

232; Islamic concepts of, 232;as journey back to God, 128,

130–131, 137; notion of “event”

in, 73; pre-Islamic concepts of,

61–62, 67–68, 93, 234, 239; repro-

duction of, 243; as social chroni-

cle, 75; stratification and the in-

terpretation of, 68–69, 112–113,

232–233Lineage, 43–44, 63, 65, 67; alternatives

to blood, 24, 232, 291–292 n. 61,

293 n. 95; authority of, 86,

240–241; ethics and, 82, 145; in

Mecca, 207–208; prophethood

and, 179–181, 185–86. See also

solidarity

Lukàcs, Georg, ixLuqman the Wise, 100–104, 106,

110–114

Lyall, C. J., xiii

Malik, Banu (tribe of), 234

marketplaces, 11, 45, 272 n. 11; cultic

nature of, 33, 35; cycle of, 29, 32,

87–88, 272–273 n. 12Marx, Karl, 22, 45, 258

Mas‘udi, al-, 10, 17, 30, 59

Mazdaism, 41

Mecca: attitude toward nomadism

in, 54; capital formation in, 19, 37,

95; class structure in, 20, 110–111,

148; division of labor in, 33; har-

mony of, 198–199, 212, 214,

268–269; Hudaybiyyah and,

222–228; Islamic conquest of,

Index • 309



190–191, 222, 227–229; Islamic

sanctification of, 200, 224; Islami-

cization of capital in, 25; material-

ist thought in, 68, 82; neutrality

of, 30–31, 36, 39; peace of, 43, 185,203, 247, 275 n. 28, 293 n. 99; po-

litical independence of, 6; propa-

gation of paganism by, 84; as site

of evil, 218; trade of, 11, 18, 30,

34, 152, 273 n. 3; vulnerability of,

34, 185, 242, 263. See also haram;

Quraysh; trade

Medina, 9; economic reforms in, 236,242; Islamicization of, 201; and

model of migration, 262–263;

Muhammad’s migration to, 151,

154–155, 161, 175, 222, 268; op-

position to Muhammad in, 139,

201–202, 271–272 n. 5, 291 n. 46;

pacts of, 152–154, 216–217; per-

sistence of nomadic outlook in,20, 30, 152; political control in,

221, 225, 242, 260; tribal relations

in, 54, 154, 216, 219. See also

Ansar

Meeker, Michael, 87

Mesopotamia, 43

Mikhael, archangel, 144

monotheism, 6, 262; as ancient tradi-tion, 146; central state and, 258; in

paganism, 90, 125; pluralistic, 215,

290–291 n. 41, 293 n. 87; politics

of, 185–186, 224; Qur’anic depar-

ture from, 208

Moses, 146, 204; justice of, 237–238;

miracles of, 116; Muhammad and,

98, 145

mu‘allaqat. See odes

Mufaddaliyyat, 74

Muhajirun, 155, 175, 190, 200, 222,

224, 245; attitude toward Mecca,

191, 198–199, 218, 261, 265–266;

lineage and, 232; Muhammad

and, 217; relation to Ansar, 220,260; war economy of, 244; as way-

farers, 252

Muhammad, 41; Ansar and, 190,

216–218; approach to social class-

es, 211, 260–261, 268, 289 n. 39;

attitude toward idols, 82, 91, 192,

291 n. 54; attitude toward the

Qur’an, 121, 292 n. 64; attitudetoward tribalism, 25, 180,

189–192, 195, 200, 208–211,

217–218, 291 n. 58; Biblical

prophets and, 98, 144–146; com-

pared to poets, 163, 187, 191–193,

195, 241–242, 253–254; economic

reforms of, 236–237; God and,

158, 160–161, 168–169; Hanifismand, 95, 98; as human messenger

of God, 26, 205, 264; Luqman

and, 101, 114; migration to

Medina, 151, 154–155, 216–218,

222; relation to nomads, 150,

221–222, 225, 229–230, 261–263,

268, 287 n. 12; sayings of,

118–119, 259; signs of prophet-hood of, 66, 165, 170; status in

Mecca, 161–162, 173–175, 178,

186, 206, 261, 263–265, 276–277

n. 51; wars of, 198–202, 222–232,

251–253, 268, 294 n. 110. See

also prophethood; prophets (pre-

Islamic)

Munafiqun, 201

Mundherites, 41, 49–50, 54

Muruwah, Husayn, 258

310 • Index



Mus‘ab Ibn ‘Umair, 152

Musaylimah, 143, 150–151

Muslims: allies of, 198, 222, 224;

crystallization of identity among,

200–202; defections among,201, 214, 225; as fighting force,

223, 225, 242; links to Jews and

Christians, 215; in Mecca, 206,

209–210; proselytization by, 228;

as separate communities, 199,

218, 220–222, 227, 230, 260; social

status of, 211–212; as transtribal

community, 217–219. See alsoAnsar; Muhajirun; umma

Mu’tah, battle of, 222

Mutalammes Ibn Umayyah, al-, 90

Nabigha, an-, xiii, 14–15, 241; style of

sedentary poetics in, 54–57;

103–110

Nagel, T., 260–261Najd, 9, 35, 41, 43, 48, 153; agricul-

ture in, 5, 30

Najran, 26

nasab. See lineage

Nippur, 88

Noah, 181, 185, 205–206, 211–212

nomadism: abstract valuation in,

20–22; adaptive strategies in, 44;authority in, 45, 47–52, 194,

247–248; concepts of justice in,

237–238; economy of, 17–18,

45–46, 53, 194, 205, 221; ethics of,

43, 45, 53, 59–63, 91–92, 94–95,

111, 246, 255, 279 n. 77; as isolat-

ed lifestyle, 46; as lifestyle sur-

rounding Mecca, 5, 39; lineage in,

207–208; logical structure in, 128,

130–131, 171–172, 280 n. 2; mate-

rialist thought in, 6, 28, 59, 66, 69,

71, 84, 96, 113, 232–233, 281 n.

16; in Mecca’s governance, 37,

267; notion of death in, 232, 234;

origins of, 12; protection of wealth under, 19, 273 n. 1; state

development in, 19, 106–107, 229,

257; warfare in, 20, 42, 46, 49, 52,

107, 220, 229, 246–251, 278 n. 74,

279 n. 85, 279 n. 87. See also

Kinda, kingdom of; nomads;

odes; solidarity

nomads: attitude toward the forbid-den months, 31–32; attitude to-

ward Islam among, 52, 139,

220–221, 225, 229–230, 261–263;

attitude toward state, 6, 105, 108,

112, 150, 194; egalitarianism

among, 45, 49, 68, 71, 84, 148,

204, 212, 232–233, 245, 252, 267,

273 n. 1; image of God among, 87,95, 229; imperial powers and,

41, 49; in the Qur’an, 151, 205,

221, 293–294 n. 105; spirituality

among, 203; trade and, 19, 30–31,

40, 43, 59, 61, 278 n. 65. See also

nomadism

Nufud wilderness, 3

Nu‘man, an-, king, 103–104

odes, 70; belonging in, 187–189,

193–195, 281 n. 12, 285 n. 48;

compared to the book, 120; com-

pared to poetry after Islam, 65,

109, 280 n. 5; concept of time in,

63, 66, 124; as documentation of

loss, 85, 93–94, 122–123, 188,

239–240; duty in, 216, 250, 280

n. 104; dynastic politics in,

Index • 311



103–110; hedonism in, 64, 76,

138, 177, 246, 281 n. 11; individu-

alism in, 69–71, 89, 157, 194,

281 n. 11; model of nature in,

121–124, 239–240; moral themesin, 76, 89, 127, 246–251, 253–255;

naming in, 85–87, 94, 187–188,

246; nomadic economy and struc-

ture of, 57, 109; notion of value

in, 24; openings of, 8, 52, 55–57,

64, 82–84, 123, 126, 238–240,

281–282 n. 19; rationale in,

55–54; realism in, 188; solidarity in, 181–185, 215–216; space in,

10; structural elements in, 13, 118,

127–129, 133–139, 162–163, 183,

286 n. 14; symbolization in, 104,

122–124, 131–133, 138; tribal

politics in, 58–59, 74–75, 117, 127;

as unifying visions, 65–67, 157,

268; wandering in, 56, 69, 120,127–129, 133, 187. See also poetry

(pre-Islamic); poets

Olinder, Gunnar, 50

ontotheology, vii, , 80, 262, 265

orientalism, 79, 90

pact of the virtuous ones, 38, 91,

277 n. 54paganism: accommodation to tribal-

ism, 85, 87–88, 90, 202–203, 282

n. 5; end of, 228, 262; ethics of,

81–82; monotheistic elements of,

90–91; among nomads, 84–85;

origins of, 85; pluralist nature of,

26–27, 32, 34, 206, 215, 267;

Qur’anic overtures toward, 206,

208–210; rituals of, 91, 199; status

of idols in, 28, 282–283 n. 11;

weakness of, 79–80, 88, 91, 263,

282 n. 2

Palestine, 41, 49

Palmyra, 6

past: in odes, 58, 146–147, 171; ethicsand, 82; idealization of, 62–65;

prophethood and, 171; ruins as,

63, 240. See also ruins (in odes);

time

Persia, 21, 32, 41–43; Kinda and,

49–50. See also Sassanid Empire

Petra, 6, 18

philology, viii, 116, 119pilgrimage (pre-Islamic): chants, 29,

32, 90; as measure of time, 73,

236; Muslims and, 199, 223; pros-

elytizing during, 118, 175, 221;

trade cycle and, 11, 29, 33

poetry (pre-Islamic), 119–120; audi-

ence in, 118; 146–147, 167–170,

176–177, 183, 239–240, 249–250,253–254, 273 n. 16; as element of

justice, 235, 241; as historical evi-

dence, xii–xiii; as mystical pro-

duction, 234–235, 241–242, 249;

as tradition, 82–83, 126, 195; as

tribal institution, 75, 89, 176, 187,

281 n. 10; truth and, 117. See also

odes; poetspoets: as arbitrators, 246–249; as

outcasts, 170, 186–187, 245, 249,

281 n. 12; as tribal spokesmen, 74,

89, 182. See also odes; poetry

(pre-Islamic)

prophethood: anticipation of, 98,

160, 168, 230, 263–266; audience

and, 148–153, 155, 165, 173–174;

belonging and, 191–193, 195–198,

222; calling and, 156–157,

312 • Index



160–161, 166, 172–173; compared

to heroism, 163, 169–170; com-

pared to sagehood, 144, 158–160,

186; as involuntary, 139–140, 180;

miracles and, 152, 162, 175–176,178, 238, 264–265; past and,

147–148, 163, 171, 264, 286 n. 3;

political aspects of, 201–202, 225,

267–268, 271–272 n. 5; Qur’anic

conception of, 143, 205; realism

in, 196–197; ritual purification in,

155, 241; selection of, 186, 260,

276–277 n. 51, 287 n. 10, 289 n. 3;as violation of social norms, 89,

177, 195–196; as witnessing, 241,

268. See also Muhammad;

prophets (pre-Islamic)

prophets (pre-Islamic), 83, 89–90,

95–101, 144, 168, 205; as family,

180–181, 215, 241; slaying of, 244;

as witnesses, 170, 254, 259. See also Luqman the Wise;

Muhammad; propehthood

Qainaqa‘, Banu (tribe of), 201

Qass Ibn Sa‘idah, 95–97

Qur’an: accommodations to pagan-

ism in, 206, 208–210, 291 n. 55;

aesthetic form in, 59, 66, 115–116,118, 161, 283 n. 16; alterations

in, 134; codes of conduct in,

119–120; community in, 183–185,

192, 195–196, 198–199, 203–207,

210, 214; conception of prophet-

hood in, 143–146; cosmic plans

in, 140; denunciation of economic

exclusions in, 19, 273 n. 4; as di-

vine knowledge, 158, 200; earlier

traditions in, 105, 119, 144–145,

168, 180–181, 219; as historical

evidence, xii; interpretation of,

115–116, 121; Luqman in, 101,

112; Meccan, 118, 120, 165, 212,

219, 227, 237, 251; Mecca’sexceptionalism in, 6, 242, 247;

Medinian, 120, 162, 217, 219, 237,

245, 266; as miraculous language,

116, 162; Munafiqun in, 201; mys-

ticism in, 121, 174; nomads in,

151, 221, 229–230, 237–238, 262,

293–294 n. 105; notion of wit-

nessing in, 233–234, 236–237,268; as organizing vision, 120; pa-

ganism in, 86; reproaches to

Muhammad in, 211, 260, 286 n.

13, 295 n. 11; revelation of, 133,

155–156, 160, 205, 241; ruins in,

124–125, 192, 202; state in,

259–260; structural elements

in, 137–140; subjectivity in,233–235; war in, 198–199,

231–232, 290 n. 32; wealth in,

212–213, 236–237, 244, 252–253,

276–277 n. 51

Qurashi, al-, xiii

Quraysh: accession in Mecca, 36; at-

titude toward Muhammad,

118–119, 175, 186, 225, 231; classdifferences within, 20, 30, 33–34,

36–39, 204, 226, 277 n. 58; sense

of prominence of, 228–229;

strength of, 31, 33, 91; trade mo-

nopoly of, 19. See also Mecca;

trade

Qusay Ibn Kilab, 32–33, 36–38, 67

Rashidi caliphate, 226, 259

resurrection, 67, 95–96, 100, 113, 162

Index • 313



revenge: as ethical duty, 51, 91, 281

n. 16; in the Qur’an, 232

Rodinson, Maxime, 271 n. 4

Roman Empire, 6, 41

ruins (in odes), 7, 10, 56–57, 68, 82,238–240, 246; abandonment of,

14, 281 n. 7; compared to haram,

85; inevitability of, 94; structural

role of,126, 159–160, 171, 249;

time and, 72, 74, 172; as tribe,

191–192; value of, 24, 28

ruins (in the Qur’an), 124–125, 137,

192, 202, 285 n. 9

Said, Edward, vii

Salih, prophet, 180

Sassanids Empire, 6, 18, 41. See also

Persia

Satanic verses, 208–210

scholasticism, 115

sedentarization: concept of duty in,170; dynamics of, 17–20, 273 n. 1,

273 n. 7; ethical uncertainty after,

267; impediments to, 43; Islam

and, 200; justice under, 99,

135–136, 238; logical structure in,

128, 131; money economy and, x;

poetics and, 54–58; in the Qur’an,

205; stratification in, 96–97, 204,213; tragic vision under, 84, 96,

233; visions of nature after,

105–106, 109–110. See also Mecca;

Quraysh

semiology, 85

Semitic migrations, 4

Serjeant, R. B., 33

Simmel, Georg, 22, 27

Simon, Róbert, 31

sinful wars, 31, 91

solidarity, vii, 25, 44, 274 n. 17;

among early Muslims, 207;

Muhammad and, 25, 173–174,

179–181, 190; in odes, 181–185,

215–216, 240, 247; in the Qur’an,203–204, 210; rise of theological,

226–227, 263, 268, 293 n. 95;

transtribal, 214, 216–218, 232,

244–245, 290 n. 21; tribal, 62, 65,

279 n. 79, 279 n. 83, 279 n. 84,

279 n. 86. See also umma

Solomon, 104–108

Spain (Islamic), 263state: Islamic, 25, 257–262, 283–284

n. 25; nomads and, 19, 106–108.

See also Kinda, kingdom of

suicide (i‘tifad): commercial failure

and, 39, 88, 95, 140, 283 n. 22

suq. See marketplaces

Syria, 12, 43, 67, 81, 85

Tabari, al-, xiii, 144, 206

Taghlib, tribe of, 42, 46, 62, 93

Ta’if, 9, 30; concept of labor in,

34–36; Mecca’s food supply and,

5; Muhammad in, 174, 217

Taima’, 18

Tarafa Ibn l-‘Abd, 13, 24, 162, 241,

246; attitude toward status differ-ences, 68, 211, 232; fatalism in,

69–71, 129, 252; knowledge in, 72;

as outcast, 74–75, 89, 176–177,

187, 193; poetic tradition in,

83–84; thematic unity in, 136

taxation: haram service functions

and, 38, 243; Islamic, 243–245,

251–252, 296 n. 23, 296 n. 26;

under nomadism, 48, 50–51,

243–244

314 • Index



Thamud, 180, 204

Thaqif, tribe of, 35–36

Tibrizi, at-, xiii, 248

time: ancient notions of, 66–68, 71,

73, 100; destruction by, 255;knowledge and, 72, 77–78; lan-

guage preservation and, 71–72,

74–75, 89; logic of history and, x,

147; opposition to space, 92–93,

108; remembrance and, 8, 172;

separation and, 192. See also past;

resurrection; ruins (in odes)

Torah, 243totemism, 87

trade: commodities of, 21; commu-

nity formation through, 24; con-

cept of labor in, 252; contractual

rationality and, 242, 262; ethical

status of, 34; as an expansive en-

terprise, 27; financial aspects of,

276 n. 43; growth of commercialrationality through, 40; interme-

diary, 30, 43; Mecca and world, 5,

273 n. 3; nomads and, 18, 30,

278 n. 65; routes of, 31, 46, 221,

272 n. 11, 274 n. 22, 277–278

n. 64; sedentarization and, 18–19;

size of, 30; spiritual dimension of,

32, 37–40, 81, 84, 91, 95; threatsto, 231, 274 n. 19. See also market-

places; Mecca

Tuhama, 9, 32

‘Ubayd Ibn l-Abras, xiii, 99, 140,

234–235, 237–242, 249, 252

Uhud, battle of, 201, 232

‘Ukaz, marketplace of, 11, 29, 55, 82,

95

‘Uman, 5, 11

‘Umar Ibn al-Khattab, 223, 226, 260,

264, 268

Umayyads, 186, 207, 259–260

umma, 213–215; compared to tribal

alliances, 217; conflicts within,219–220, 230, 261, 267; consolida-

tion of, 218–219, 244–245, 261;

contrasted to tribal solidarity, 54;

as sanctuary, 222; selection of

caliph within, 259–260, 290 n. 21;

status of warriors in, 251–252,

296 n. 37; as tangible community,

221–222, 224, 262; taxation with-in, 243–245, 251–252. See also

solidarity

‘Urud, 9

usury, 244, 252–253, 276 n. 43

‘Uthman Ibn ‘Affan, 150, 223,

226–227, 229, 260–261, 264, 268

wandering: as desert lifestyle, 4–7,250; freedom and, 15, 247; logic

of, 128; as a noble lifestyle, 43, 63;

in odes, 10, 69, 127–129, 187. See

also odes; nomadism; nomads

Waqidi, al-, xiii, 198

Waraqah Ibn Nawfal, 98, 150

warfare: economy of, 244, 252–253,

296 n. 35, 296 n. 37; Islamic com-pared to nomadic, 25, 251, 253;

against Mecca, 222–232; 242,

265–266, 295 n. 3; Muhammad

and, 198–202; in odes, 246–251,

254

Watt, William M., 258

Yamama, 9, 21

Yaqut al-Hamawi, 9, 17

Yathrib. See Medina

Index • 315



year of the elephant, 41

Yemen, 6, 9, 11, 18, 73; agricultural

economy of, 5; decline of, 31, 33,

42–43, 278 n. 72; extent of, 9–10;

Kinda and, 47–50, 153; tradecommodities of, 21

Zaid Ibn ‘Amru, 97–98

Zaid Ibn Haritha, 150

Zamzam, 36

Zarqa’ l-Yamama, 104, 108

Zauzani, al-, xiii

Zoroastrianism, 41

Zufar, 21

Zuhair Ibn Abi Sulma, 89, 99, 127,

162,176; attitude toward status

differences, 68; belonging in,186–187, 215, 240–241; code of

conduct in, 76–78, 114, 119,

158–159,251, 253–255; poetic

tradition in, 84; as sage, 72–73, 74,

77,216; symbolization in,

131–132, 138; war in, 163, 189,

246–251

316 • Index



mohammed a. bamyeh is assistant professor at New York University. He

teaches comparative civilizations and social theory at the Gallatin School andis an affiliate of the sociology department. He has been awarded a Social

Science Research Council–MacArthur Fellowship and has published articles

and a monograph on the history and theory of intercultural exchange. Cur-

rently he edits the journal Passages: Journal of Transnational and Transcultural

Studies and the book series World Heritage Studies in Transnationalism and

Multiculturalism.

bamyeh - the social origins of islam

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